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Friday Fun: An update from the Founder and CEO of World Wide Web, Inc.

Just like the author of this piece, I too attended a recent talk by Cory Doctorow -- a brilliant talk relating the life and death of Aaron Swartz with the theme of his latest novel Homeland -- and similarly I often marvel at how lucky we are that the web is free and open. Enjoy this wonderful little satire and shudder at the possibilities. The World Wide Web is Moving to AOL! The World Wide Web has been great, but to be honest, it's also been a lot harder than it needs to be. I know some of you love creating new web pages and participating in online discussions, but the last thing most…

So Much to Do at APHA

Itâs impossible to attend all of the interesting-sounding sessions at the APHA annual meeting, so now pressed-for-time attendees can catch up on some of what theyâve missed through the APHA Annual Meeting Blog. Kim Krisberg, Bithiah Lafontant, Alyssa Bindman, and Patti Truant are reporting on sessions at the blog; so far, theyâve posted on communicating with reporters,war and public health, how the public health community can address climate change, public health practitionersâ use of new online tools, the lives of child workers, public health preparedness (here, too), and the opening…

Beware BlogBurst

I received this email from the editors of Medgadget.com, regarding the situation that exists with BlogBurst, which is apparently a rather shady organization. If you are a member of BlogBurst, you will definitely want to read this. If you are considering joining BlogBurst (or any blog listing service), you should be aware of a few things before you do so; Dear Bloggers, We, the editors of Medgadget.com have noticed a trend that may negatively affect the blogosphere, and felt we should address it to you. Recently, an operation called BlogBurst (blogburst.com) of the Pluck Corporation began…

What could be better than undergraduate research in Las Vegas?

Well, probably getting a stipend to help you do it. And, the really cool thing is that's part of the deal! Hustle, hustle the deadline is March 7th, and all the contact info is below. The NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates program in Environmental Microbiology at UNLV is accepting applications. This grant provides students with the opportunity to work on a research project for a 10 week period with a faculty mentor. Students receive a $4000 stipend, round trip airfare, and housing in a UNLV dormitory. Mentors have projects in the following areas: ⢠Adaptation of…

KITP: getting organized

getting organized - unlike the totally laid back string theorists, the astrophysics program has daily morning meetings to discuss progress except today today we get to meet after lunch, everybody was kinda busy this morning for some reason... then we get informal short talk presentations once a week on thursdays, on top of the seminars, colloquia and lunch talks - the thursday talks will be recorded and podcast and video feeds made available online ooh, first monday seminar will be: ""Emergent phenomena in negative heat capacity systems: fundamental physics from dense star clusters" by, er…

Archaeobooks Blowout 27 October

My part-time employer, the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, has been publishing books for over two centuries and rents a huge storage space for books in central Stockholm. Most of the stock isn't moving very fast. In fact, a lot of it hasn't moved at all since Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee. Storage is expensive. The Academy now feels that a lot of the funds devoted to storing these old books would be better used in, for instance, scanning the books and putting them on-line for free. On Saturday 27 October, the Academy's book store is opened to the public, and most of the books will be…

Celebrating Your New Henge

Mike Parker Pearson and team have excavated part of a huge Neolithic settlement at Durrington Walls above the Salisbury plain, not far from Stonehenge. Finds are abundant and suggest that the place was a seasonal ceremonial feasting site. Says MPP, "We're talking Britain's first free festival. It's part of attracting a labour force - throwing a big party". And you know what that labour force did? Yep, among other tasks they pulled massive blocks of rock on sledges from Wales to Wiltshire and built something that still stands after several millennia. I wish the Neolithic record in the Lake…

Buying a New Board Game

Lately I've been playing more board games, thanks to gaming friends moving to my area, and also to my son and his buddies reaching an age where they can understand and enjoy games. I have a number of good board games from the 70s, 80s and 90s, and the newest one in the house is Blokus from 2000. Now I'm thinking of buying something new, and I'd appreciate some suggestions. Here's what I have in mind. A new game, 2006 or later. Suitable for age 12 upward. Typical session length less than 4 hours. English, German or Scandy. Not a spin-off on an earlier game such as Settlers or Carcassonne. So…

Amazon Freaks Out

In my email this morning, I have a note from everybody's favorite online retailer, informing me that: We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated books by Christopher Moore have also purchased Esther's Revenge at Susa: From Sennacherib to Ahasuerus by Stephanie Dalley. OK, fine, they see a correlation, and are sending me a heads-up. Of course, they then go on to provide the jacket copy for the book being recommended: Why are the names of the chief characters in the biblical Book of Esther those of Mesopotamian deities? Stephanie Dalley argues that the narrative reflects real…

Terra Sigillata announces new home at CENtral Science

Click HERE to come to our new home: cenblog.org/terra-sigillata/ Please update your bookmarks and see this farewell post about our departure from the ScienceBlogs community after four years and this inaugural post at CENtral Science. CENtral Science is an online forum associated with Chemical & Engineering News, the weekly publication of the American Chemical Society that covers, "science and technology, business and industry, government and policy, education, and employment aspects of the chemistry field." The majority of the bloggers there are Ph.D. staff writers for the magazine…

Second strain of flu may be complicating flu picture

I've noted several times here how more measured heads keep emphasizing that a) we're working on partial information in responding to the current swine flu outbreak and b) new developments may complicate things at any point along the line. Here's a great example of what these folks (like Effect Measure, Crof, and Avian Flu Diary) are talking about. From Reuters : Second strain of flu may complicate picture-study 06 May 2009 15:02:09 GMT By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor WASHINGTON, May 6 (Reuters) - A second strain of influenza, one of the seasonal strains, may have mutated and may…

Almost time for Science Online '09!

Late tonight (or is it early tomorrow?) Mrs. Laelaps* and I will start on our drive down to North Carolina for the Science Online '09 conference! We'll be making stops at the NC Zoo and the Duke University Lemur Center along the way, but when we recover from Friday's traveling we'll be ready for the great conference sessions on Saturday and Sunday. (I will be co-moderating two back-to-back sessions on the first day; "Teaching College Science: Blogs and Beyond" and "The Web and the History of Science".) It is going to be a very busy weekend, but I look forward to seeing old friends** and…

The "Two Cultures" discussion at the Intersection

C.P. Snow fans, prepare to head over to the Intersection to partake in an upcoming online discussion of Snow's famous "Two Cultures" address. In their new article, "The Culture Crosser," Sheril and Chris portray Snow as a sort of science policy prophet: It helps to think of Snow as an early theorist on a critical modern problem: How can we best translate highly complex information, stored in the minds of often eccentric (if well meaning) scientists, into the process of political decision making at all levels and in all aspects of government, from military to medical? At best that's a…

Sequencing cancer genomes: the inside story

Over at PolITiGenomics, Washington University's David Dooling discusses his work as part of the Tumor Sequencing Project. The TSP and a variety of other groups (like The Cancer Genome Atlas) are using large-scale sequencing to create comprehensive maps of the genetic changes that underlie cancer formation. The cancer genome sequencing community have already made impressive headway - Dooling notes two papers in this week's edition of Nature, one from the TSP on lung adenocarcinoma, and another from The Cancer Genome Atlas on glioblastoma (which received extensive media attention when it was…

Bilingual Brains: Reading in Hebrew and in English

I've got an article that appeared in this week's Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles about recent research from Hadassah University on the neurobiology of bilingual (English-Hebrew) reading. Is the English-reading brain somehow different from the Hebrew-reading brain? You might not expect any major differences; after all, both languages are alphabetic and are read more or less phonetically by breaking words into their constituent sounds. Compare English and Hebrew to a logographic language like Chinese or Japanese, and the similarity between the alphabetic languages becomes obvious. But…

Cyber attacks caused blackouts?

The CIA on Friday admitted that cyberattacks have caused at least one power outage affecting multiple cities outside the United States. Interesting... Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, said that CIA senior analyst Tom Donahue confirmed that online attackers had caused at least one blackout. The disclosure was made at a New Orleans security conference Friday attended by international government officials, engineers, and security managers from North American energy companies and utilities. Paller said that Donahue presented him with a written statement that read, "We have…

Friday Deep-sea Picture: Phakellia sponge (07/24/08)

Deep Sea News' Friday edition has a new mission - to "restore" small black and white figures from obscure scientific journals to their original color, hoping to give these images a new life and audience online. The paper's citation will be included. Please contact us if you have something to share. The image of Phakellia sponge is from the Johnson Sea Link submersible surveys of a Florida bioherm at 171 m depth in the west Atlantic. The sponge is about 2 ft tall. I like it because it's a good example of convergent evolution. You have to ask yourself, is Phakellia a sea-fan imposter? Or vice…

Hilariousity Break: Buying Phish Tix

So Mr. Z and I went to that Phish show last Friday night. We bought our tix for that show from a ticket liquidator online. Had to call them to confirm and all because it was last minute. They were all set to walk us through the VERY COMPLICATED PROCESS of opening the email, downloading the emailed tix doc, and printing it. First thing the person on the phone said was, "Hey Phish fan, are you ready to have fun? Are you doing 'shrooms already?" (We were not, then or later.) Then he began talking very slowly and carefully to Mr. Z. "Do you have a computer? Do you know how to turn it on? Do you…

DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge 2008: more incentives for your donations.

Today is day 10 of Blogger Challenge 2008, in which generous ScienceBlogs readers help public school teachers come up with the funds to deliver the educational goods to their students. As I write this post, challenges mounted by ScienceBloggers have crossed the $10,000 mark. Given that this money has come from 113 donors and that there are about a bajillion ScienceBlogs readers, I'm guessing there are some folks thinking about making a donation but hanging back from actually donating. My hope is that this post will give you that little push forward you might need. You'll recall that I've…

Annals of peanut butter: it keeps getting worse

by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure The peanut butter with a side of salmonella story just keeps getting worse (other posts here, here, here, here, here, here). The toll so far is 8 dead, 575 confirmed salmonella cases (and undoubtedly many more never reported) and 1550 products recalled, one of the largest recalls in US history. The Peanut Corporation of America (PCA) plant in Blakely, Georgia, sold peanut butter in bulk to institutions (like nursing homes and schools) and peanut paste and similar ingredients to many other companies. And even as it did so, its own and government…

ScienceOnline'09 - interview with Arikia Millikan

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January. Today, I asked Arikia Millikan, the former Overlord here at Scienceblogs.com, to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background? First and foremost, I consider myself a scientist, though perhaps not in the…

What Darwin Never Knew (online)

If you missed it, you can still watch it online.

The Cell on science blogging

There is a new (nice and long) article by Laura Bonetta about science blogging in today's issue of the journal Cell. Bloggers on A Blog Around The Clock, Pharyngula, Aetiology, Framing Science, The Daily Transcript, Sandwalk, In the Pipeline, Nobel Intent, Useful Chemistry, De Rerum Natura and Panda's Thumb are mentioned and/or interviewed. A couple of carnivals, e.g., Tangled Bank, Mendel's Garden and Gene Genie are also mentioned. For those who have no access to The Cell, I am assuming that each one of us will egotistically quote the part about oneself (like we did last month with The…

winners and losers

The big NASA individual PI grants are being announced in time for the holiday shopping season... Most of NASA's university PI based research and analysis is awarded through the ROSES annual omnibus Request for Proposals - the RfP typically comes out just after the State of the Union speech, with first deadline usually 90 days later, and a main "proposal season" in early summer, though some programs straggle through to the beginning of the following calendar year. The Requests for Proposals for individual lines are often heavily amended, postponed or cancelled as the actual budget takes…

Scientopia: A new kind of online science blogging community

This past Monday morning a new science blogging community came online: Scientopia! From their Vision: Scientopia is a collective of people who write about science because they love to do so. It is a community, held together by mutual respect and operated by consensus, in which people can write, educate, discuss, and learn about science and the process of doing science. In this we explore the interplay between scientific issues and other parts of our lives with the shared goal of making science more accessible. As a community, we strive to be welcoming of anyone with an interest in science…

But... It's *just* a blog!

One of the most rewarding sessions I was a part of was "But it's just a blog!" run by Hannah Waters, Psi Wavefunction, Eric Michael Johnson, Jason Goldman, Mike Lisieski and Lucas Brouwers. The main question was: how do new bloggers get noticed and read in a sea of emerging science blogs? Furthermore, how do they get over the self doubt and "impostor syndrome" that keep them from feeling like they belong and become an important voice in the science blogosphere? Coming into this session, I had to face my own impostor syndrome (or, as Emily best coined it, "I'm not Ed Yong" syndrome). As the…

Institute for Creation Research Masters Degree in Biology

The Institute for Creation Research (ICR) has, some time ago, filed for approval to run a masters degree program in life science education. The purpose of the degree is to train educators to present biology in a way that is consistent with Christian Biblical beliefs, as opposed to actual scientific knowledge. The Texas board in charge of these matters is taking the proposal under consideration this week. (Please sign the petition linked below!) The Texas Freedom Network has recently conducted a survey of Texas colleges and university faculty to get their opinions on this proposal. The…

Welcome to Coral Week

This is Coral Week. Not to be confused with International Year of the Reef 2008. The goal of this week is to pull you away from the reef, actually, down into the deeper, darker parts of the ocean where corals still thrive. We want to introduce you to the other corals, the maligned and neglected ones, like the octocorals (aka soft corals, or sea fans), the cup corals, the matrix formers, the black corals, and the zoantharians like the gold corals, which can grow to be 2000 years old. Deep corals hold secrets just like the shallow ones. They have alot in common, actually. We'll write about that…

Some quick comments on learning

I am totally ready to get back to blogging. In fact, I have a post that is 3/4th complete that I have been working on since before Christmas. Anyway, in order to procrastinate a little bit more I would like to share two learning observations (maybe they are not really about learning). Kids these day First, I was in the airport. When I am sitting around starring at the walls, I can't help but accidentally overhear someone that is 4 feet away. So this guy was talking about how impressed he was with kids these day in school. They are learning all sorts of stuff that he had already forgotten…

Teaching Blogging

Right after last year's ConvergeSouth I tried to get my school to let me teach a class on blogging. Posted on October 13, 2005 here and again on January 16, 2006 here. Somewhat related to the whole ConvergeSouth experience. I've been pitching a blogging course to my school for a while now (not NCSU, but a community college where I teach). It's been slow and disheartening so far. Nobody knows what blogging is. Also, there is a rule that one needs to have an appropriate degree for a class. In the case of a blogging class, this would mean, or so they said, either journalism school or computer…

Nice to see y'all in NYC!

After a long sit on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport, I'm home from the ScienceBlogs blogger and reader meet-up. Many thanks to all of you readers who came out on Saturday to meet the bloggers at Social Pub, sponsored jointly by Seed Media Group and NYC Skeptics. The threatened anti-vaccination crowd did not materialize and I had a delightful time chatting with Dr Val Jones of the Voice of Reason blog, Peter Frishauf, founder of Medscape, one of the Medgadget proprietors, a reader named Dawn whose blog I cannot remember right now, and Steve, a pharma/biotech attorney. Dr Val was totally…

Small-Town Alberta Provides Big Support for Cancer Drug Trial

Although the dichloroacetate (DCA) horse has been beaten beyond recognition, PharmCanuck sends some interesting news from north of the border about how University of Alberta researchers have generated funds to support their clinical trial of this unpatented compound. Our correspondent writes: I was a stunned this morning when I read an online article on the CBC website (http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2007/10/04/fundraising-dca.html) revealing the source of the trial funding. Amazingly, almost 1/3 ($250K) of the $800K raised has come from the efforts of the small town of Peace River, Alberta…

TGIF: Another Atlantis

Let's make Friday a special occaision here at Deep Sea News. Last Friday we posted a geeky fish video and an online video game, along with the usual photo. Folks were so thankful for the entertainment that our gross national product probably dropped by one millionth of one percent. We should make it a tradition, out of respect for our European friends, if not ourselves. Whatever happened to Fridays back in the American 70's, you know, with wall posters of kitty cats hanging from a limb saying "Hang On, Baby Friday's Coming" rather than foggy mountain vista's saying "Inspire. Achieve"?…

Water Facts

From Michael Specter's article in the New Yorker (not online): Nearly half the people in the world don't have the kind of clean water and sanitation that were available two thousand years ago to the citizens of ancient Rome. More than a billion people lack access to drinking water, and at least that many have never seen a toilet. Half of the hospital beds on earth are occupied by people with an easily preventable waterborne disease. In the past decade, more children have died from diarrhea than people have been killed in all armed conflicts since the Second World War. Clean water isn't a…

The Rumors Are True

tags: science news, SeedGroup, ScienceBlogs To the best of my knowledge, I have never been the subject of gossip before, probably because I am the most boring person whom you could ever know. However, an e-magazine, Element broke the news today that Scientific Life and several other science blogs will be moving to a new location. This has not exactly been a secret because I have hinted several times in the previous months that I will be moving to a new server, and some friends and colleagues have been following the development of this project behind the scenes, but the details of this move…

Twitter and Time Scale Management

Over at the Inverse Square blog, Tom Levenson announces that he's started Twittering in a post that contains, via Carl Zimmer, the best argument for why Twitter matters: Carl laughs me out of my seat. He points out that he tweeted his visit to my class, and received in return a couple of requests to pass on hellos from blogospheric friends I haven't seen since January (hello back, Dave); that a growing audience exists to feed him almost real time reactions to questions; that whatever I might think there is a hierarchy of information, and if I ignore the swift and the short, then I lose my…

Pressure Canning 101

Note: This is part of a two-part piece on the basics of canning (the whole thing in more refined form is contained in _Independence Days_ as well). In a previous post, I wrote about putting canning in perspective - it is not all of food preservation, nor is it essential. That said, however, I get more questions how how to can than all other forms of food preservation put together, so since my food storage class is doing Pressure Canning this week, I thought I'd re-run essays I've written about how to can. I should note, I ask that anyone who has never canned before (or not for decades -…

Good signage at Tangled Bank #98

The latest Tangled Bank is now online at Quintessence of Dust.

Tangled Bank #59

The newest Tangled Bank is now online at Science and Reason.

Full text of The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection

Is online. Also note the collected papers of R. A. Fisher.

The Detox Delusion: Kudos to Duke Integrative Medicine Nutritionist

Yesterday, the real-life mailbox brought the Pharmboy household the Fall 2009 issue of DukeMedicine connect, a biannual publication on current news from the Duke University Health System. Produced by DUHS Marketing and Creative Services, it "strives to offer current news about health topics of interest" to its readers. This issue is not yet online but you can see the Spring 2009 issue here. What caught my eye was a cover teaser titled "Detox Delusion" and an article on detoxification diets focusing on an interview with Beth Reardon a nutritionist with Duke Integrative Medicine. (Note added…

Pseudonymity and undisclosed conflicts of interest: online book review edition.

I'll confess that I am not one who spends much time reading the reviews of books posted on the websites of online booksellers. By the time I'm within a click of those reviews, I pretty much know what I want. However, a lot of people find them helpful, and the ability to post your own review of a book (or a film, or a product, or a business) online seems to give consumers more of a voice rather than leaving it to "professional" reviewers or tastemakers. Who, after all, knows whether those professional reviewers' first loyalties are to the public? But, unsurprisingly, it turns out that…

Tangled Bank #53

The latest Tangled Bank is online at Science Notes: Go climb a tree!

An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles #1

The inaugural blog carnival celebrating the Beetles is now online- go see!

OJR writes about ScienceBlogs

Online Journalism has an article about ScienceBlogs. I get quoted a couple of times.

Nanotechnology: Where Did It Come From? What Is It For?

The World's Fair sits down with Nanotechnology Scholar Cyrus C. M. Mody to discuss the history, ethics, and policy world of nanotechnology. And other stuff. Mody is a Science and Technology Studies guy, and now a member of the Department of History at Rice University. He is a leading light in science studies and/of nanotechnology; his work has appeared in numerous professional journals (see end of this post for a select bibliography); he is a sometime participant at nanotechnology and microscopy meetings (his earlier work was on the recent history of probe microscopy); and, of course, he is…

Best Science Books 2011: Kansas City Star, Salon, Slate, Zocalo Public Square

Another bunch of lists for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best sciencey books" lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous 2011 lists are here. This post includes the following: Kansas City Star Top 100 Books of 2011 Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation by Andrea Wulf The Quiet World: Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 by…

For the nerd who isn't very bright

Oh, boy — get out the model airplane glue and little bottles of paint: you can build a model of Noah's Ark! And it's only $74! (The price of plastic models has sure gone up since I used to buy them with my lawn mowing money). This injection molded plastic model kit measures over 18 1/2" long and includes 3 separate interior decks with embossed wood texture and many details including ramps and animal cages and corrals. The kit offers several building options. Modelers may display the Ark in cross section to reveal the internal decks or in the full-hull version. Additional building options…

Why deny only one part of science? IDists branch out into AIDS denial

Over at Uncommon Descent, the blog of William Dembski and friends, a contributor has a post up discussing Peter Duesberg's aneuploidy hypothesis for cancer (which Orac discussed here for more background). The post itself is a bit confusing--it's titled "When Darwinism Hurts," and according to the author's clarification, it's about "Darwinism" leading us down the wrong path as far as cancer research goes. (Though whether cancer would be due to mutations in specific genes or in chromosomes, it's still an evolutionary process, but I digress...) To me, anyway, the more interesting portion was…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Polarized Light Leads Animals Astray: 'Ecological Traps' Cause Animal Behaviors That Can Lead To Death: Human-made light sources can alter natural light cycles, causing animals that rely on light cues to make mistakes when moving through their environment. In the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, a collaboration of ecologists, biologists and biophysicists has now shown that in addition to direct light, cues from polarized light can trigger animal behaviors leading to injury and often death. Male Crickets With Bigger Heads Are Better Fighters, Study Reveals, Echoing Ancient…