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Americans Hate Their Jobs More Than Ever

Ok, no nobody really *likes* to work. Even if you like your job, there are some days that you'd rather just sleep in or not have to jump through hoops or deal with your boss' same old TPS-report complaints. A recent survey (2006 General Social Survey) of 27,000 random Americans noted that less than 1/2 of Americans are satisfied with their jobs, with the trend being greatest for the under-25 crowd and weakest for the 55+ group. Seems about right, as most of the jobs you have when you're young are awful, and at 55 years old you've got retirement on the horizon. Twenty years ago, the first…

My Pi Day Entry: "Yes, PeCan" Pi

Rumor has it there's going to be a no-holds-barred culinary throwdown here at Scienceblogs in honor of Pi Day. Personally, I need little excuse to make a pie. And the staffer needs little excuse to eat pie - particularly pecan pie. So here is my entry. . . .the "Yes, PeCan" Pi. As pies go, this is a simple one that can handle some imprecision. It's a little different every time I do it. And in the spirit of 3.141592-oh-whatever-who-cares, I embrace freely rounding off quantities whenever I feel like it.* In fact, I used my ubercool but uberimprecise Equal Measure to make this Pi: "Yes,…

Animated Dracula Syphilis! STDs in 1973 (updated!)

This is un freaking real. My friend John O at Armed With Science has dug up a classic animated film produced for the National Naval Medical Center in 1973. It starts with an awards ceremony for the "Communicable Disease of the Year," hosted by the Grim Reaper (who turns out to know a lot about medical history.) The top prize is won by the Dracula-esque Count Spirochete (AKA syphilis), over the vociferous objections of a shortlist of other diseases, including smallpox ("I've scarred and disfigured millions of people!") and gonorrhea (who resembles a lavender Tribble with a pitchfork). The…

After this Saturday, it's all gravy!

This post brought to you by my intense desire to avoid grading any more papers. More than a dozen years ago, when I earned my Ph.D. in chemistry, I made what many at the time viewed as a financially reckless decision and purchased academic regalia rather than just renting it. At the time, there was apparently just one company who even made the regalia for the university from which I earned my degree. Given their monopoly, they could charge a bundle -- almost $600 -- for the gown, hood, and mortarboard. (Despite the price, I would also argue that the uniform still needed modifications to be…

Chaotic delights always come in threes

The winds are blowing off of the Rockies, hitting the Front Range with brute force. The winds make walking around campus either fun or near impossible, and shake my townhome with enough force to rattle the ornaments on the mantel. The odd thing about the winds is the warmth.... it isn’t the slightest bit chilly. Still, the leaves have fallen from the trees around the school buildings, left to now dance around in the breeze. That shaking mantel is covered in tinsel and lights.... nevermind the warmth; it’s nearly the holidays! So, here’s an odd assortment of things to do on a windy Tuesday…

Medact on Iraq health

Medact, a UK health charity has a new study on the effects of the war on health and the health system in Iraq. Some extracts: A recent scientific study has suggested that upwards of 100,000 Iraqis may have died since the 2003 coalition invasion, mostly from violence, mainly air strikes by coalition forces. Most of those reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children. Many thousands of conflict-related injuries were also sustained. Infant mortality has risen because of lack of access to skilled help in childbirth, as well as because of…

Monkey Juice

by Katie the Lowly Intern Does the sinking feeling of knowing you could have gotten what you wanted had you made better choices in life sound familiar? Like how if in college, had you gotten a real degree, set goals for yourself, and not tried to buy friendships with your credit card, you could possibly now have a steady job, ambition, and friends? If it does, then you may rest easier tonight knowing there is a term for that: "fictive thinking". And guess what... monkeys get it too! Researchers at Duke University have concluded that monkeys don't respond solely to direct punishment or…

You'll Love How Deep We Go

Via Rick, news on the wire is that the deepest spot in the ocean may soon be included in a marine monument. As mentioned earlier today, my Saipan colleague Angelo Villagomez is leading the charge on the creation of a new marine monument in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). The proposed monument would in part recognize the significance of the Mariana Trench, which at a depth of 6.8 miles is the deepest part of the world's oceans, and the deepest location on the surface of the Earth's crust. The deepest part of the ocean, and deepest part in the earth's crust, is Marianas…

A tale of two terrorists

So the failure of an underpants bomb on an airplane has led to a massive rethinking of our entire approach to airline security, as well as our intelligence analysis. Conservatives think it should also prompt us to rethink closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay, and keep terrorism trials out of federal courts. And yet, today we are reminded that the nation was far less galvanized by a more successful act of recent terrorism. Because today: James W. von Brunn, who was accused of fatally shooting a security guard at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in June, died on…

Warning: contains FDA approved drug

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) doesn't want Americans to buy legal pharmaceutical products from Canada where the identical drug is considerably cheaper because the imported drug might not be safe. Those unreliable Canadians. Better to pay top dollar for heparin from the American subsidiary of a Big Pharma multinational, Baxter Healthcare. Except that the active ingredient in Baxter's intravenous heparin came from China. From an uninspected plant. And there was indeed a safety problem: More than 350 adverse reactions to the drug have been reported to the FDA since the end of 2007,…

Getting the word out on cancer in IBM workers

by Dick Clapp The publication of my article on mortality among IBM workers was the culmination of a two and a half year process. I obtained the data, which included information on the deaths of nearly 32,000 former workers who had died between 1969 and 2001, when I served as an expert witness in a lawsuit brought against IBM on behalf of employees who had developed cancer after working at the companyâs San Jose facility. I found that among the workers, the death rates from several cancersâincluding cancers of some digestive organs, kidneys, brain and central nervous system, melanoma of the…

"Computer On Fire" - An Ordinary Family's Oral History of Technology

The IBM 705 Data Processing System, introduced in 1954. The 705 would rarely run more than 3 or 4 hours without a major breakdown. It was not unusual to encounter a 705 that was ablaze." This should give all of us pause the next time our PC crashes! What is your family's history? Have you ever reflected on what their lives was like, when life was seemingly simpler? What if we could take a snapshot of our lives, our families, just one, every ten years? What was your family doing 100 years ago? Let me share some "snapshots" of our ordinary family {a personal and idiosyncratic point of…

Here's some of my money for a research grant. Please charge me again.

If you live in the US pay taxes and some of those taxes go to support important basic research into the causes of disease. Most of that research is disbursed through an elaborate peer-reviewed granting system at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The point of doing that research is to tell the world scientific community what you have found. "Normal" scientific progress is incremental, building on the work of other scientists. Paying for that research has been shown to be a good investment that has paid for itself many times over. But if you've paid for it once in taxes, why should you…

On Nymity

The whole issue of pseudonymity has come up again, both on Google+ and on ScienceBlogs. While I've been on the Internet for nigh on 20 years, my initial point of entry was through a Usenet group that strongly preferred real names (or something real-name-ish). As a result, I've never tried to maintain a separate Internet name-- all of my Usenet posting and all of my blogging has been under my real name. So I don't have a great deal invested in the question, on a personal level. There are a couple of points, though, that I think are worth making about the recent discussion: 1) There's a much-…

Reading Is Reading, but Books Are Not Fungible

The New York Times front page yesterday sported an article with the oh-so-hip headline "Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?." This turned out to be impressively stupid even by the standards of articles with clumsy slang in the headlines: Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association. As teenagers' scores on…

"Going Direct": NSF Launches Science Nation

The future of science journalism and communication will involve three key strategies: 1. "Going broad" and reaching a diversity of audiences across non-traditional media platforms such as entertainment film and television, new genres of documentary film, new forms of multi-media storytelling, new genres involving satire and comedy, and through collaborations with the creative arts. 2. "Going deep" and creating new non-profit forms of digital science journalism, especially at the local or regional level, that offer rich reservoirs of information via content contributed by professional…

Video game recalled to avoid offending conservative Muslim video game players

... wait, wait, does this make any sense at all? Wouldn't the conservative Muslim clerics normally call for the gruesome execution of children who play video games because they involve the creation and manipulation of images of humans and animals? So Koranic lyrics in a background song ... that is just salt on the wounds, right? Here's the story from the BBC: Copies of LittleBigPlanet are being recalled from shops worldwide after it emerged that a background music track contained two phrases from the Koran. Sony issued an apology for any offence that its use of the backing track might have…

Turn out the troops and give them hell

Scott Hatfield is asking for assistance: one of the old school Liars for Jesus, Don Patton, is going to be speaking at his public high school. This is disgraceful. Patton is a sleazy fraud, and to have him abuse public school facilities with his dishonesty is completely inappropriate; confine him to the churches, where nonstop lies are a regular feature. Scott asks what can be done. Here's my general prescription for dealing with these slimy hoaxsters: Advertise. These guys feed on an ignorant audience; they get a lot of praise by packing auditoriums with the most stupid people they can…

About that ad predicting the fall of Darwinism in 2013…

I know, I know already. We're getting creationist and religious ads appearing on the right sidebar. Seed has farmed out some of their ad space to a generic ad provider, which doesn't pay us much and which stuffs in ridiculous ads from any old desperate wanker who wants to buy some attention. In this particular case, I know the guy behind the ad: he was one of those obsessed cranks who, for a while, was sending me nagging emails every day demanding that I read his ReVoLuTiOnArY ThEoRy. I guess he got tired of the cold shoulder and decided to buy space on the web, a sure measure of exactly how…

Two old posts about Hillary Clinton

I wrote this on January 28, 2006. Was I wrong then? Is that wrong now? Have things changed in the meantime? Lefty Blogosphere and the Love/Hate of Hillary ------------------------------------------------ Chris Bowers on MyDD recently had a post asking why the Progressive blogosphere does not like Hillary Clinton. Here's a little bit from Chris: Now I can explain what this all has to do with Hillary Clinton. As obvious as I thought my last point was, it is probably even more obvious by now that Hillary Clinton is, um, not exactly the most popular Democrat within the blogosphere and the…

The ubiquitous Neil Shubin…

…has another interview online.

Science Journalism/Communication week in review

Lots of interesting stuff this week, so I decided to put everything in a single post - makes it easier for everyone.... First, there was a very nice article in Columbia Journalism Review (which someone subscribed me to - I guess because my name appeared there the other week....someone is trying to remind me how it feels to read stuff written on actual paper!) about the beginning of a resurgence of science journalism in North Carolina. The article covers all the bases, focusing mostly on the new Monday science pages produced collaboratively by The Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News &…

From the bench to the Hill: science policy (and sale shopping)

On Wednesday, I gave a breakout session talk on science policy jobs at MIT. I love talking about science policy, so it's not too hard to get me to do it - it's harder to get me to stop - and we had a great group of Boston-area grad students who asked excellent questions. Very fun. The talk did force me to reflect on how different things are in my life since I left the bench. I'm certainly working no fewer hours (apparently Scienceblogs has been experiencing a denial of service attack this week, and I did not even notice. Bad sign). I still often have to do things I don't particularly enjoy,…

"Just print it!"

A common response, including in the comments at Book of Trogool, to raising digital-preservation issues is a chortle of "Guess print doesn't seem so bad now! Let's just print everything out, and then we'll be fine!" Leaving aside my own visceral irritation at that rather rude and dismissive response—no, we won't. "Just print it out" doesn't stand up to a moment's scrutiny. Let us scrutinize a moment, shall we? Problem number one is the variety of digital materials that become useless the instant they are printed, or cannot be "printed" at all. Hypertext. High-resolution imaging, as from…

The Arts as a Healing Balm for Mansplaining's Psychic Ills

March is women's history month, but don't let that circumscribe your fun. You can get together with a posse of your like-minded women friends and mock mansplainers anytime. Now, I know many of you have just recently learned that there even existed a name you could attach to this annoying behavior plaguing your existence. Believe me, I know how important naming experience is - that's why I have a whole category assigned to the topic. But your joy need not begin and end with just knowing that the craptastic manifestations you've been subjected to are (1) not your fault, (2) part of a larger…

Missed the Simpsons last night?

You can watch it online.

Global food crisis

Speigel Online. Check this graphic.

Internet and Information Overload

Thanks for your patience while I was on vacation. If I wasn't so jet-lagged, I'd probably feel really relaxed. (I'm currently in that circadian netherworld that not even caffeine can fix.) Hopefully, I'll get around to blogging about the books I read while away. But for now, let me just say that I enjoyed my break from the internet. I think we underestimate the cognitive toll of being online all day. At first, I experienced the usual symptoms of withdrawal: there was the vague unease of disconnection, of being severed from this infinitude of information. But then I realized that I didn't…

Offal is Good

The offal refers to.... ....those parts of a meat animal which are used as food but which are not skeletal muscle. The term literally means "off fall", or the pieces which fall from a carcase when it is butchered. Originally the word applied principally to the entrails. It now covers insides including the HEART, LIVER, and LUNGS (collectively known as the pluck), all abdominal organs and extremities: TAILS, FEET, and HEAD including BRAINS and TONGUE. In the USA the expressions "organ meats" or "variety meats" are used instead. Offal from birds is usually referred to as GIBLETS. Another,…

Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in a hybrid economy. New York: Penguin, 2008. 327pp.

"The past can survive only if it can beat out the future" (p. 142) Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Laurence Lessig is a great and important book, one that should be read by anyone interested in the future of the Internet, culture and expression. This book is a plea and an argument for a business model for culture and creativity, one in which supporters of the arts are willing to pay creators directly for their output. I'm not convinced. I'm also not not convinced. Like the best non-fiction, this book engages you in an argument. I literally found myself…

Greed and Buffoonery in Academic Publishing

I've just signed another one of Sage Publications' ridiculous publishing agreements, prompting Aard's first re-run of an entry from my old blog. Here's something from 29 September 2006. I agreed to a really crappy business deal today. For a long time, academic journals from commercial publishers have grown in number and become more and more expensive. Individual scholars can no longer afford subscribing to them at all, and most research libraries have to prioritise strictly when choosing which ones to take. There is a successful resistance movement against these tendencies, Open Access…

Should technology be banned from the classroom?

I'm the department Luddite. I use Powerpoint less often than any of my colleagues, and I'm the person who argues that rooms in a new building need to be designed to allow natural light and views when desired (as well as be able to be darkened adequately). But I'm also the person in my department who plays around with our newish course management system (Moodle), experimenting with a variety of online assignments and quizzes and data-sharing. And I'm the only person to have taught a "lecture" class that met in a computer classroom. (And, of course, I blog, and Tweet, and I was on Usenet before…

Voting Ends Tomorrow for the Science is COOL video contest!!

Which is the coolest science video? You tell us! Cast your vote now for the Kavli Video Contest People's Choice Award! You have until tomorrow to VOTE! What are you waiting for? Just check out all the great science videos online, and then you rate them! And be sure to give your favorite a 5 stars rating. Voting for the People's Choice Award is fast and easy !!! First, you need to register and log into the SciVee site http://www.scivee.tv Then view all of the Kavli science videos here Click the star rating you prefer under each video that you review. A "Thank You for Voting" notice will…

Voting ends for the Kavli Video Contest on Wednesday!

Which is the coolest science video? You tell us! Cast your vote now for the Kavli Video Contest People's Choice Award! Just a few more days to vote! Just check out all the great science videos online, and then you rate them! And be sure to give your favorite a 5 stars rating. Voting for the People's Choice Award is fast and easy !!! First, you need to register and log into the SciVee site http://www.scivee.tv Then view all of the Kavli science videos here Click the star rating you prefer under each video that you review. A "Thank You for Voting" notice will appear and your vote will be…

ScienceOnline2010 - introducing the participants

As you know you can see everyone who's registered for the conference, but I highlight 4-6 participants every day as this may be an easier way for you to digest the list. You can also look at the Program so see who is doing what. Cynthia Allen is the Editor and Writer in the Office of Science Education at National Institutes of Health where she blogs on their SciEd blog. She is also on Twitter. Laurel Bacque is in charge of communications, a blogger, and the online community manager for the IceCube - the South Pole neutrino-hunting telescope. And she is on Twitter. Craig McClain is the…

Science Blogging at SICB and in NC

Grrrl, PZ and John will be panelists at the Media Worskshop during the next SICB meeting. You bet I am jealous! SICB is the coolest of all science meetings ever! Their workshop is about science blogging: Media Workshop: Hey, Wanna Read My Blog? Blogs are online "diaries" that are growing in popularity. Popular political and social commentary blogs are making the news, but is there more out there than chatty gossip and collections of links? How about some science? Can this trendy technology be useful for scientists? Come to the Media Workshop and find out! Experienced science bloggers…

NASA Astrobiology Roadmap 2 and 3: Prebiotic Evolution and Evolution of Advanced Life

The future of Astrobiology research within NASA is being set now. Next week there are further opportunities for community input. The online discussion for Solar System Exploration wraps up today! If you are an active researcher, a student planning on getting into astrobiology, or an interested member of the community, this is your chance to provide input on the direction of research. This is your future. Be there, or we will choose for you. The NASA Astrobiology Roadmap exercise is under way, and will continue over the next two weeks. NASA Astrobiology The next two topics will kick off…

Link love, shameless promotion edition

If you're not yet familiar with researchblogging.org, you need to click the picture. It's a blog-aggregator that pulls together posts about peer-reviewed research, and since the intersection of published research and blogging is getting a lot of play lately, this is a must-see. In addition, Dave Munger is launching a new forum to discuss research blogging where yours truly will be a janitor moderator. Next, I've started a new forum for the discussion of many of the issues seen in this space, at Science-Based Medicine, and any other interesting issues that come up. It's set for moderated…

Register for Science Online 2010 before it's too late!

Registration for Science Online 2010 is open. The conference web site is here and program info is here. Time is running out. There are currently about 175 registered and the organizers are going to cap it at 250. I've attended the conference for the past two years and it's a blast. I really enjoyed the sessions as well as the informal times between sessions, at the meals and in the bar. I've registered already, as has my son, Sam, who's in grade 11. He attended last year and also had a great time. Bora even interviewed him! There's been a good tradition of librarians attending the…

Darwin Correspondence Project

tags: Darwin, Darwin Correspondence Project, evolution, biology I have mentioned this before when the project was first underway, but all of Darwin's letters are now catalogued online for everyone to read. For those of you who don't know, Darwin was a prolific correspondent, regularly writing to nearly 2000 people during his lifetime. Among his correspondents were geologist Charles Lyell, the botanists Asa Gray and Joseph Dalton Hooker, the zoologist Thomas Henry Huxley and the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, as well as well-known thinkers and public figures, as well as ordinary men and…

Perverted Justice

I don't know if any of you saw last night's Dateline NBC show about sexual predators online. It was dragged out way too long and redundant, very poorly produced, but I think the project is very valuable. Working with the folks at Perverted Justice, a group that tracks and exposes folks who troll for sex with children online, NBC and the Sheriff's department in Riverside, California, set up a sting operation. Posing as 12 and 13 year old boys and girls in chat rooms, they would get messaged by men and set up dates with them. When the men arrived, they were confronted on camera and then…

links for 2007-12-28

The Least Essential Albums Of 2007 | The A.V. Club "Every year produces great music and a nearly equal amount of terrible music. Then there's the not-so-creamy middle, the albums that have no real reason to exist, but nonetheless find their way to music-store shelves and online music stores." (tags: music review culture) The Best Books We Read In 2007 | The A.V. Club Genre fiction tops the list! (tags: books review culture) AFP: Priests brawl at Bethlehem birthplace of Jesus "Seven people were injured on Thursday when Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests came to blows in a dispute over…

What brain games do you like?

There's a fair bit of evidence that playing games can enhance your cognitive ability and prevent decline as we age. Or at least that's the excuse I use when I take a few minutes off during the course of the workday to play a game or two. Here are some of my current favorites: Str8ts. This game confused me at first, but once I got the hang of it, I was an addict. Follow the walkthrough to get an idea of how it's played, then play the daily puzzle. Tip: You can type as many numbers as you want into each cell, then eliminate possibilities until you figure out the answer. Kakuro. I play the…

New online tools from Nature

OK a good friend and former colleague has induced me to get a Connotea account ... and I have to say that it's great. It's like a cross between Endnote and your bookmark page ... on steroids. If you don't know what Connotea is, it's a social bookmarking tool that lets you keep track of websites, files (such as online pdf files of scholarly articles) all while giving you the power of organizing these bookmarks with a single click of the button. One great feature is the ability of Connotea to extract all the info you need for any online publication simply by either adding a button to your…

A little help?

Update: Michael has been kind enough to track down a copy of A Discourse on the revolutions of the surface of the globe..., although it looks like I'm going to have to learn French if I want to read Researches on fossil bones. I've been reading a lot about Cuvier as of late, but I realized that I haven't actually read much of Cuvier's own work (not being able to read French is a general impediment). I was wondering, then, if any of you know of available English translations of Discours sur les revolutions du globe ( A discourse on the revolutions of the surface of the globe, and the changes…

South Park season premier!

You can watch it online today!

In the Wake of Science Online (#scio11): Supporting New Bloggers

I'm not sure exactly how, but somewhere between the lemurs, the books, the dinners, and the ridiculously short sleep sessions that I encountered at Science Online, I managed to learn quite a bit from many of those science writers to whose level of awesomeness I aspire, and am consequently left with a handful of scattered thoughts. Here is the first set of those scattered thoughts. Comments are, as always, welcomed and appreciated. At the first of two sessions that I helped co-moderate, we discussed ways for the more established science writers to help support new talent. There is a bit of a…

A Modest eBook Proposal for Publishers and Libraries

A recent change by Harper Collins Publishing regarding library-owned eBook has met with a lot of criticism: The value of this magically convenient library book -- otherwise known as an e-book -- is the subject of a fresh and furious debate in the publishing world. For years, public libraries building their e-book collections have typically done so with the agreement from publishers that once a library buys an e-book, it can lend it out, one reader at a time, an unlimited number of times. Last week, that agreement was upended by HarperCollins Publishers when it began enforcing new restrictions…

An Island in the Middle of the Charles River?

(Click to embiggen) Don't worry, I'm not describing Boston Mayor Menino's latest harebrained scheme. Esplanade Magazine, which is some great architecture/real estate porn (and it's free!), describes an effort in 1907, during the heyday of the City Beautiful Movement, to build an island in the Charles River. It didn't happen due to opposition from Beacon Hill residents (naturally...) who opposed what would have been called St. Botolph's* island. But imagine if the island had been built (from Esplanade Magazine): It's May, almost time for Commencement, and you are sunning yourself at the BU…

Friday Fun: 5 True Stories That Prove You Shouldn't Piss Off The IT Guy

Yeah, I'm sorta an IT guy, or at least I used to be a real IT guy. I guess now I'm a former fake has-been IT guy. In any case, this one from Cracked really tickled my cyborg funny bone: 5 True Stories That Prove You Shouldn't Piss Off The IT Guy. Let's take a quick peek at number 5: #5. Omar Ramos-Lopez Remotely Shuts Down 100 Cars If we told you that a young computer whiz disabled more than 100 cars from his computer, you'd probably think "Man, this Hackers remake is gonna suck." That's the sort of wildly impossible feat that could only come from Hollywood's ridiculous conception of…