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One quarter of my heritage at its finest

I've probably never mentioned it before, buy I'm 1/4 Lithuanian. Here's something one of my cousins sent me to make me "proud" of that heritage: VILNIUS, Lithuania - Lithuanian police were so astonished by a breath test that registered 18 times the legal alcohol limit, they thought their device must be broken. It wasn't. Police said Tuesday 41-year-old Vidmantas Sungaila registered 7.27 grams per liter of alcohol in his blood repeatedly on different devices after he was pulled over Saturday for driving his truck down the center of a two-lane highway 60 miles from the capital, Vilnius.…

Nine days of 9 (part 5): Is there any point to post-human technologies?

Many thanks to everyone for their wonderful, thoughtful and altogether delightful ideas on what memories we should store for a post-apocalyptic world. Now, in case you're some knuckle-dragging moron who can't follow links or scroll down the page, or worse, a freakin' newbie, let me explain: I got a whole load of these books. They ain't your regular yawn splash science textbooks! These are some fine glossy coffee table books, containing stills and things from the Tim-Burton-produced Shane-Acker-created animated feature 9 starring Jennifer Connelly and also a bunch of other people I don't have…

Winter mornings

My kid is growing, and I'm of course ambivalent about it. It's not that she's becoming some sort of giant---she's still a tiny little thing, but now she picks up books and starts reading them. When she does, I usually start shouting excitedly, but she reminds me that I'm not allowed to be excited. She wants to enjoy her new powers in peace. She's outgrowing her car seat, especially when bundled up for winter. And with Midwestern winters being what they are, she's bundled more mornings than not. It's time for me to buy a booster. When I wake up in the morning, I take my shower, shave…

The times they are a-greening

Where environmental groups had been fighting against new coal plants only days ago, a record buyout will put TXU firmly behind their agenda: Under a proposed $45 billion buyout by a team of private equity firms, the TXU Corporation, a Texas utility that has long been the bane of environmental groups, will abandon plans to build 8 of 11 coal plants and commit to a broad menu of environmental measures, according to people involved in the negotiations. The roster of commitments came through an unusual process in which the equity firms asked two prominent environmental groups what measures could…

Like fish in a barrel

I doubt that the research that produced Nobel prizes in Chemistry and Medicine/Physiology cost $4 million combined. I don't really know for sure, but some of the most fundamental discoveries cost quite little to make. I point this out only because the DI's "Mr. Suave" aka Rob Crowther, is bragging that the "Discovery Institute Has Put Over $4 Million Towards Scientific and Academic Research into Evolution and Intelligent Design in the Past Decade": “In 1996, it was almost impossible to receive funding to do scientific research related to intelligent design,” says Bruce Chapman, President of…

It Isn't Gridcrash that Makes the Lights Go Out

April is the month that utility shut-offs are resumed in much of the northern half of the country - it is against the law to shut off people's primary heating fuel during the winter, but when they can't pay their bills, generally speaking, April 1 means that you can cut them off. There has been some upheaval in our area, where an unusually cold spring has meant that there is still a need for supplemental heating, and many poor people with very cold houses. I thought it was worth re-running this article - a version of this ran in 2005, and I've republished it several times since then. We…

Behold the Birth of the Giga-Borg

If you follow @ScienceBlogs on Twitter, you may have seen a cryptic tweet yesterday, just saying: ScienceBlogs will soon be making a very exciting announcement - so stay tuned! SciBlings (who by then knew what the news was going to be, but were asked to keep it under the wraps until the official announcement) had some fun teasing everyone else - here are some examples: RT @ScienceBlogs: ScienceBlogs will soon be making a very exciting announcement - so stay tuned! (We are ALL Belle de Jour) RT @ScienceBlogs: ScienceBlogs will soon be making a very exciting announcement - stay tuned! (We plan…

EuroTrip '08 - Trieste, the Open Access panel

Here are, quickly for now, some pictures from the yesterday's panel "Open Access; let's do it: top down, bottom up or both?" Stevan Harnad did his presentation first via Skype (from Montreal) which was, unfortunately, not recorded. The rest of the session was recorded and at some time in the future will become available online - I will let you know when this happens. Since most of the panel discussed institutional library repositories, I felt I needed to focus entirely on the "other Open Access", i.e., the OA journals, especially PLoS. More later....(also it seems that the wifi at the hotel…

It's Big Bird! No, it's Gigantoraptor!

This is Gigantoraptor erlianensis, a newly described oviraptorosaur from late Cretaceous of China. It's a kind of nightmare version of Big Bird — it's estimated to have weighed about 1400kg (1½ tons for non-metric Americans). Histological examination of the growth structure of the bones suggests that this fellow was a young adult, about 11 years old, and that they grew rapidly and reached nearly this size by the time they were 7. And since it is a young adult, there were probably bigger gigantoraptors running around. They also compared limb length to other dinosaurs, like the tyrannosaurs—…

The Telegraph has second thoughts

Earlier, I blogged about the seriously flawed Telegraph article about rape. Now Carl Zimmer has discovered that the newspaper has yanked the article from its site. No explanation, no apology - it's just gone. I feel silly that I didn't grab a screencapture of the original article. Although I'm aware that nothing is immutable on the Internet, it just didn't occur to me that someone would yank a published article from a newspaper with no explanation. I guess we have to think of online newspapers as unreliable AND impermanent. Ephemeral, in fact - just like the real, pulpy, newsprint-smudgy…

Nature special issue a treasure trove for personal genomics fans

The latest issue of Nature contains an embarrassment of riches for those of us interested in personal genomics, and indeed I'm having trouble figuring out which article to write about first. Just look at the options: there's a review on approaches to tracking down the missing heritability of common diseases; there's a potentially highly controversial plea from Chicago researcher Bruce Lahn for acknowledgment that "genetic diversity contributes to variation across numerous physical, physiological and cognitive domains" between human populations; and there's an advance online publication…

Congratulations to Daniel Rhoads

Via A Blog Around the Clock comes news that Daniel Rhoads, who writes the informative blog Migrations (and formerly A Concerned Scientist), has successfully defended his dissertation. So, after a few minor revisions, it looks like it won't be too long before we'll have to call him Dr. Rhoads. In good blogger form, Daniel has published the first chapter of his dissertation online. The title of the chapter is "Integrin receptors and determinants of polarity in directed cell migration," and it looks like a nice overview of the subject. As someone who used to study cell migration in blood…

Federal fisheries address shark butchery

Surfrider Foundation's online newsletter Soup is reporting new rules from the National Marine Fisheries Service that federal shark fisheries in the Atlantic ocean and Gulf of Mexico will need to bring shark fins in to port with the carcass of the animal attached. Environmental News Service details the story here. It's a grim ruling, but should help to curb the practice of cutting fins from living sharks and then returning the animals directly to sea. Hopefully, the increased load to fishing vessels will reduce profitability. Any ocean lover who has seen video of the bleeding and sinking…

Blogger Perceptions on Digital Preservation Survey

If you have a moment, this is a useful study to participate in: Do you blog? If yes, then please consider participating in an online survey from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. The study, Blogger Perceptions on Digital Preservation, is being conducted under the guidance of the Real Paul Jones. The study team is interested in hearing from all bloggers on their perceptions on digital preservation in relation to their own blogging activities, as well as the blogosphere in general. To hear more about this survey, please visit the study'…

We're OK TO GO!

As you have undoubtedly heard from sources more overtly journalistic than this one, SETI is back online! After federal and state financial cutbacks forced the institute's shiny new Allen Telescope Array (ATA) into indefinite hibernation earlier this year, cosmically-minded geeks all over the globe donated money in droves, bringing the search for extraterrestrial life back from oblivion. Over $200,000 in donations from thousands of fans -- including Contact's own Jodie Foster, science-fiction writer Larry Niven, and Apollo 8 Astronaut Bill Anders -- will get science operations up and running…

What happens to the poorest residents in states declining the Medicaid expansion?

The Washington Post’s Lena H. Sun writes about Obamacare implementation, and finds that it differs greatly between Maryland and Virginia, which share a border but have very different attitudes toward the Affordable Care Act. Both have large uninsured populations (around 800,000 in Maryland and 844,000 in Virginia), but Virginia’s opposition to the law means it’s getting far less federal money and leaving its poorest residents with fewer options for affordable insurance coverage. The lawmakers who wrote the ACA included two main ways to help those without employer-sponsored health insurance…

Finding Land - Shared Land

I've written previously that I suspect that given the enormous pressure to feed a world of 9-10billion people that will dominate the political, social and activist dynamics of this century, Land access is going to be one of the central issues. Indeed, in much of the Global South it has been for many years - consider the Brazilian MST as one of many examples of how people's movements bent on establishing land access for the very poor emerge. At the same time, we can see the global land-buy-up occurring now as nations as diverse as China, India and Saudi Arabia, all facing a future in which…

Willpower depletion and the brownie decision

In a new New York Times Magazine piece, John Tierney pulls together the results of several studies that suggest willpower is finite and decisionmaking exhausting. While these findings are important in many ways (Tierney leads off with an example from the criminal justice system), I was especially interested in the implications for dieting. The whole article is well worth a read, but in a nutshell, researchers have found that subjects' willpower can be depleted by resisting temptation and be restored by glucose -- but not by artificial sweetners that provide less energy. When subjects'…

Science Online 2009 London Conference Scheduled

Last year, thanks to you, my loyal beloved readers, I was able to attend the Science Online conference held in London, England, where I was a speaker. This conference is being held again this year -- and I hope to be there! Proposed topics include blogging and microblogging, online communities, open access and open data, new teaching and research tools, author identifiers and measuring the impact of research. Science Online 2009 London is scheduled for 22 August at the Royal Institute of Great Britain, thanks to the generous support of Nature Network, Mendeley Research Networks and The Royal…

Monckton and Bolt defame John Lefebvre

Richard Littlemore has posted an annotated transcript of his debate with Monckton, with corrections to Monckton's numerous false statements. Andrew Bolt thinks the best argument that Monckton had in the debate with Littlemore was his defamation of one of the funders of Desmogblog, so he repeats it, falsely accusing John Lefebvre of being "a convicted Internet fraudster", when in fact Lefebvre has not been charged with fraud, let alone convicted of it. I don't know much about the law, but doesn't that make Bolt liable as well as Mockton if Lefebvre decides to sue? Jacob Sullum comments on what…

Links 7/15/11

Links for you. Science: The Asian needle ant, an accidentally imported termite killer A Journal Is Not a Data Dump How Seawater Can Power the World Tiny snails survive digestion by birds (I wonder what this does to your microbiome...) Other: Ann Coulter Confuses Liberal and Conservative Psychology Not-So-Representative Investors The selfish revolution 11 Things the Richest U.S. Households Can Buy That You Can't More Proof That Obama is Herbert Hoover (when a former Goldman-Sachs employee argues using Marxist language that Obama is too conservative, he has gone way too far to the…

It's yet another atheist bus poll

I just don't get it. Put a few signs with the atheist point of view on a bus, and people everywhere just freak out. Anyway, Toronto secularists are planning to slap some signs on some busses now, so this poll asks the strange question, "Should atheist groups be allowed to buy advertising space on the TTC?". I should think that the answer to this one ought to be 100% yes — after all, what grounds do they have to discriminate against atheists? — but here's the current results. Yes - if religious groups can do it, why not let atheists as well? 57% Maybe, but it depends on the wording of the…

Fraud, Debt Levels & Educational Attainment

I'm continuing to bore you with the Federal Trade Commission's report on Consumer Fraud in the United States. Would it be surprising to hear that individuals with higher levels of debt are more likely to be victims of fraud? Yes, people in debt can be desperate, and thus be more likely to fall for scams, but there is another reason--people in debt are highly targeted by listbrokers (companies that sell lists of consumers). DirectMag's Listfinder has over 400 lists of debtors for sale. Scammers can buy these lists and target these populations for their frauds. The good news is that,…

How much plastic did you throw away today?

There is a gigantic pile of plastic garbage accumulating in the Pacific. It's concentrate by currents into one floating mass of bottle caps and detergent bottles and nylon debris, all slowly breaking apart into broken bits of polymer bobbing in the waves. It's not good for marine life. One of the most vivid demonstrations of the effects is this series of photos of dead sea birds on remote Midway Island — all completely undisturbed and photographed as found. Finding decayed bird corpses reduced to bones and feathers isn't at all surprising, but some of these remains look more like the remains…

Homeland Security saves money by dropping newspaper subscriptions

So they say. I guess even the government is not interested in saving the newspaper business....eh! Q1: why did they subscribe every employee? Couldn't they buy one copy and put it in the waiting room at the reception desk, or at the water cooler, or in the dining hall? Or, well, they could have come up with some kind of a video-rental store, but for books/newspapers/magazines. Oh, wait! Q2: why don't they introduce this brand new technology to all their employees? It is called a computer and it can be used to get into a set of tubes called the Internet, where one can go on something called…

Darwin Quotes

Here we see how potent has been the effect of the introduction of a single tree, nothing whatever else having been done, with the exception that the land had been enclosed so that cattle could not enter. But how important an enclosure is, I plainly saw in Farnham, in Surrey. Here there are extensive heaths, with a few clumps of old Scotch firs on the distant hill tops: within the last ten years large spaces have been enclosed, and self-sown first are now springing up in multitudes, so close together that all cannot live. - Charles R. Darwin, Origin of Species, p.123 Support The Beagle Project…

Tesla Model 3 is Breakthrough Technology

The Tesla Model 3 will have a 215 mile range. Zero to sixty in 6 seconds, in case you ever have to do that. Seats five adults. Five star safety rating. Uses supercharging (so, if supercharged, charges in something like the time it takes to fill up a gas car IF you also use the bathroom, pick up a candy bar, there's a few people in line ...). It cost the same as a lot of cars a lot of people buy: $35,000. It is 100% electric. You can't have one yet, but if you really one one and work on it you might be able to get one by the end of the year. The first ones out will be distributed to their…

Ex Football Star Publishes Book on his Multiple Personalities

Just a short note via Sports Illustrated: Georgia football legend Herschel Walker is expected to reveal in an upcoming book that he has multiple personalities -- a revelation that surprises the man who coached the 1982 Heisman Trophy winner. ... "Breaking Free" will chronicle Walker's life with multiple personality disorder, according to Shida Carr, the book's publicist at Simon & Schuster. Carr said the book will be published in August, but gave no other details and declined to provide excerpts. I wonder whether this developed after football? I'm curious to see the book when it comes…

The way things go

The Way Things Go Peter Fischli and David Weiss, 1987 Hirshhorn Museum I went by the Hirshhorn a few weeks ago, and this was my favorite piece: a film depicting a slow-moving, low-budget Rube Goldberg apparatus built by artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss out of tires, candles, fuses, ramps, ladders, and random objects. I mean, what's not to like about a flaming tetherball? The purpose of the apparatus? Nothing, really, except to spin itself out. It's pointlessly meditative. And I liked that - you could start watching the film at any point and stop at any point, as if you were watching…

How Dumb are Car Buyers?

So dumb that we're still buying SUV's. Despite the fact that gas is now almost $3 a gallon, the average fuel economy of new 2006 models was virtually flat with a year ago at 21 miles per gallon, according to a new EPA report. In fact, this is lower than the average fuel economy of new cars in 1987 (22.1 mpg). Why the lack of progress? Because people are more interested in horsepower than fuel economy. While new cars in 1987 had an average of 117 horspower, new cars in 2006 averaged 219 horsepower. This is depressing news: even when the marketplace should encourage people to buy more fuel…

WTF? That's all I have to say.

A few weeks ago, having fallen asleep on the couch watching TV, I awoke to an ad for a most wondrous product. Well, not exactly. In fact the product, known as a Snuggie, left my scratching my head. Three questions came to mind: Who on earth is too stupid to use a blanket? Who on earth would buy a product that makes them look either like a complete dork, or a monk with a fuzzie robe? Would anyone actually go out in public with such a thing? That's why, on a Sunday when my brain's too fried to write anything about science (or even that coherent), I was happy to see the cheap and quick blog…

Safrole (Root beer or amphetamines?)

Safrole is a simple organic compound found in sassafras oil: It has a pleasant odor and used to be used to flavor root beer, but sassafras oil has fallen out of favor in the past few years for a few reasons: first, safrole has been deemed carcinogenic and banned as a flavoring agent by the US FDA. Second, it's actually a drug precursor - like pseudoephedrine-containing allergy medicines, it's not illegal to buy sassafras oil (as far as I know, I've never tried!), but it's watched closely by US drug enforcement. The people buying pints at a time probably aren't making a few gallons of root…

Delicious Internet Noms

The science of espresso, with a dash of geology -- Darcy's law! Four Stone Hearth (58th Edition) -- Anthropology carnival! Association of American Geographers Anne U. White Fund -- A grant for doing field work with your partner. Would've been nice to know about this when I was scrimping to pay for plane tickets in an LDR... The Curious Cook - Wine Enhancement Devices Are Put to a Test -- "the obnoxious, dank flavor of a “corked” wine, which usually renders it unusable even in cooking, can be removed by pouring the wine into a bowl with a sheet of plastic wrap." And remember, if you're in…

Fools

In order to protect their property values, landowners in North Carolina are clearcutting their land. If that seems silly to you, know that you aren't alone. Apparently, their plan is to make the land unsuitable for endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers. The town is considering instituting a moratorium on land-clearing permits, and the feds are pointing out that even if the land were designated as protected habitat, it would still be possible to build, and indeed trees with nests in them could still be cut down under some circumstances. Personally, I'd rather buy land that I knew would be…

Ruapehu video help

I wouldn't normally use this blog for something like this, but google has failed me. When I was in New Zealand, I saw a video on the 1995-96 eruptions at Ruapehu titled Witness to Eruption made in, I believe, 1999. It had some excellent footage of the eruptions in the 1990s as well as the 1950s, along with some great examples of interactions between the populations/businesses near the volcano and the eruption (namely the ski areas). I assumed I could get back to the states and look up the video on google to buy a copy, but no luck! Does anyone have any knowledge about where I could find this…

This "DNA" wall art = glorified barcode

I think DNA is amazing. I think biotech inspires great design. And if you've read this blog at all, you know I love sciart. But I just cannot understand the new infogenetics product from DNA 11 - the company behind that trendy gel electrophoresis wall art. While I'd normally just say "I don't get it" and move on, DNA 11 claims that their "augmented art" is "the ultimate intersection of biology, art and technology." I don't know how that could get more squarely in the BioE wheelhouse. So let's take a closer look at how, exactly, biology and art intersect in the "Ancestry Portrait" (pictured…

How I spent Evolution Sunday

Today is Evolution Sunday, and as part of the "festivities" I headed up north to speak to the Congregation for Humanistic Judaism of Morris County about evolution. I had an absolutely wonderful experience (I felt very welcomed by the group and they had terrific questions), and although I do not have a transcript of the events, I hope I can accurately sum-up the lecture and following discussion here. The lecture I delivered today focused on a topic that is a common one on this blog; contingency. In trying to make sense of the unity and diversity of life on earth over time, I tried to pick out…

Let's Meet Atheist and Author, William Lobdell, Today!

tags: books, memoir, godlessness, losing faith, William Lobdell I am most pleased to tell you that William Lobdell, an award-winning journalist from the LATimes, who is also a new book author, as well as a blog writer, college lecturer and public speaker and media consultant, will be in NYC this coming Saturday to talk about and read from his hot-off-the-presses book, Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America -- and Found Unexpected Peace. When: Saturday, March 14, 300pm - 430pm Where: The third floor of the Muhlenberg Branch of the Public Library, 209 W.…

Meet Author William Lobdell

tags: books, memoir, godlessness, losing faith, William Lobdell I am most pleased to tell you that William Lobdell, an award-winning journalist from the LATimes, who is also a new book author, as well as a blog writer, college lecturer and public speaker and media consultant, will be in NYC this coming Saturday to talk about and read from his hot-off-the-presses book, Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America -- and Found Unexpected Peace. When: Saturday, March 14, 300pm - 430pm Where: The third floor of the Muhlenberg Branch of the Public Library, 209 W.…

World Water Day 2011: Water for Cities

Every March 22nd is designated as World Water Day, with the goal of "focusing attention on the importance of freshwater and advocating for the sustainable management of freshwater resources." This year's theme is "Water for Cities: Responding to the Urban Challenge," in recognition of the fact that half the world's population now lives in an urban area. Nearly 40% of this urban expansion occurs in slums, where the infrastructure is insufficient for delivering clean water to residents and properly handling sewage. I addressed the sanitation aspect of urban growth a few months ago in "From the…

Why I Don't Worry About Immigration

Aard regular Phil often expresses worry about the effects of immigration. This has reached the point where I've decided to collect a few points to explain why I am not worried. Phil recently even claimed that when I say I'm not worried, I create more support for anti-immigration movements. This makes no sense to me. I know a lot of fear-and-hate voters are poorly educated, but I don't think they're all stupid. So here's why I don't worry about immigration. I have lived for 21 years (and counting) on a multicultural 1970s housing estate and seen very few problems. My first wife was a second-…

Parasites preaching prosperity

When I read this tale of woe, I have to admit I had a hard time feeling much sympathy for the victim. The message flickered into Cindy Fleenor's living room each night: Be faithful in how you live and how you give, the television preachers said, and God will shower you with material riches. And so the 53-year-old accountant from the Tampa, Florida, area pledged $500 a year to Joyce Meyer, the evangelist whose frank talk about recovering from childhood sexual abuse was so inspirational. She wrote checks to flamboyant faith healer Benny Hinn and a local preacher-made-good, Paula White. Only the…

The Australian’s War on Science 79: Maurice Newman versus your lying eyes

Maurice Newman, former chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, has the necessary lack of scientific qualifications to write about climate science in The Australian (Google “Losing their religion as evidence cools off”): So when in 1969 Paul Ehrlich claimed because of global cooling it was an even-money bet whether England would survive until the year 2000, he could not immediately be proven wrong. After all, this was a cooling period. Newman is just making things up here. Ehrlich did say that there was a 50% chance of England’s collapse by 2000, but not because of global…

The Moral Mind

There's an odd article in the NY Times today on Marc Hauser's hypothesis that the human mind contains a "moral grammar," somewhat akin to a Chomskyan linguistic grammar. The article is odd because, while it acknowledges that Hauser's idea is supported by almost no direct evidence, it never mentions any alternatives to Hauser's theory. (If you're going to write about a tentative hypothesis, you should at least mention that other hypotheses exist.) If you only read this article, you'd assume Hauser was the first person to argue that human morality is an evolved, biological trait, and that his…

Cool conferences = mental overload

My brain is completely overloaded at the moment after the two absolutely fabulous conferences I've attended in the past week. I'm going to do individual posts about each conference, but I thought I'd give some initial impressions in this post first. As a reminder, the conferences were BookCamp Toronto and Managing Data for Science. First of all, BookCamp Toronto, an unconference attended mostly by people from the trade book publishing industry, the Canadian version of which is centred here in Toronto. There were quite a few authors in attendance as well as some publishing people from other…

SSP09: Wrap up of day one

I wasn't complete sure what to expect with this conference. There were some old acquaintances from the society publishers who spend a lot of time with the Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics Division at the Special Libraries Association (Hi Tony! Hi Terry!). I also spoke with a representative of IMLS, some other librarians, and Victor from Mendeley. Some sessions had some people spouting marketing BS about impressions and conversions and librarians as checkbooks, but the majority were friendly and looking to better scholarly communication. In the morning after the keynote, I went to We Have…

World Opera, Collaborative Science, and Getting On The One

(blows off the dust since the last entry) (Life trumped blogging; my first child was born in March) Just before I went into the parent tunnel, which is awesome by the by, I attended a seminar conducted by Niels Windfeld Lund, General Manager of the World Opera. Not my usual event. But music's always been a passion for me, and I performed a lot as a kid - lots of trumpet, both the sort of american wind orchestra stuff (seated and marching...yes, a band geek) and some jazz, a little bit of drums. These days I plink around on an acoustic bass, badly, but well enough that I'll be able to sing…

Depression Holidays - Not So Depressing After All!

During a three month period, between September 9 and December 16th, we have Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Simchas Torah, Asher's birthday, Simon's birthday, Thanksgiving, Isaiah's birthday and eight nights of Chanukah. It was manifestly poor planning on my part to produce three kids between Rosh Hashana and Chanukah, but it also means I don't have the luxury of slacking off on holiday prep - not if I want to do them sustainably. Now on the one hand, I think most of us realize that the traditional Western holidays and birthdays are kind of ridiculous. Less is good for our kids, good for…

From the Archives: Groundswell: Winning in a world transformed by social media by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff

I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here. This one, of Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, is from January 23, 2009. ======= The first wave of social media books, like Wikinomics or even Here Comes Everybody, were of the "what the heck is…

New issue of the Journal of Science Communication

New issue of the Italian Journal of Science Communication is out with some excellent articles (some translated or abstracted from Italian, all in English): Cultural determinants in the perception of science: Those studying the public understanding of science and risk perception have held it clear for long: the relation between information and judgment elaboration is not a linear one at all. Among the reasons behind it, on the one hand, data never are totally "bare" and culturally neutral; on the other hand, in formulating a judgment having some value, the analytic component intertwines -…