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June Pieces Of My Mind #3

It would be quite nice if writers feared for their lives over the difference between publishing city and printing city in bibliographies. Then they would be more motivated to get it right. My parents are great. They've got so much hiking gear, at 74 they still know exactly where they keep it, and they're happy to lend it to me. All I've had to buy for four days' mountain hiking is boots and a pair of sufficiently long waterproof pants. 24 applicants for Stockholm U archaeology lectureship, several with exceptional qualifications. Looking at the list I realise that you could staff two new…

London Vacation

Got back last night from a six-day stay in London with wife & daughter. YuSie had rented a flat in Southwark for us via Air BnB, so we had a good base of operations. I fell ill with a bad cold halfway through our stay, which explains the complete lack of museum visits and rock gigs, but I still managed to do some fun stuff. (Left to their own devices, it turns out, the ladies will sleep late, eat big meals, shop for clothes and ride buses for fun.) Outsiders in London portrait photo exhibition in the crypt of St Martin in the Fields. Lovely work, interesting subjects, and I had a long…

Why Basketball is Better Than Golf

While on vacation in Michigan, I played a round of golf, which I do a few times a year. I shot reasonably well, when you consider that it was my first round of the year, and it was pouring rain. I even birdied one hole, by chipping in from about thirty feet off the green, so go, me. The course we were playing is a fancy club in a resort area, and so the rental clubs were nicer than the clubs I own. In particular, they had one of those oversize drivers, and now I understand how it is that people come to believe that there's no problem in golf that can't be solved by spending money. I generally…

The Amazon Kerfuffle

(I really loathe both the longstanding practice of marking a scandal by appending "-gate" to a name and the newer version "-fail." I don't have a better alternative, but I hate both of those. Somebody get to work on a better scandal signifier.) So, the hot topic of the moment is the hissy-cow being thrown by Amazon and Macmillan over the pricing of e-books. A great many electrons have been expended in discussing this on the Internet, but Jim Henley's take is probably the one I like the best, and links to most of the others. UPDATE: Jim's follow-up post today is even better. It attempts to use…

Introducing a new in-depth feature: Cognitive Monthly

Today we're introducing a new feature on Cognitive Daily. Every month, in addition to our regular blog posts, we're going to create a downloadable mini-book (or maxi-article, take your pick) about an issue related to cognitive psychology. Surprise, surprise, it's called Cognitive Monthly. Although based on posts that have appeared in CogDaily, it goes beyond what's in the blog, synthesizing and incorporating interviews and other insights. The first issue (May 2009) comes out today! This month's report, "The Illusion of Theater," covers the remarkable science behind what theatrical…

Rosenberg writes rubbish about DDT

Tina Rosenberg, who wrote the hopelessly inaccurate article What the World Needs Now Is DDT, is back with more falsehoods about DDT: The truth is that many malaria victims would be better off if America still had the disease. If malaria still existed in America, we would be attacking it with DDT . In fact, we did exactly that. Yes, obviously if there were mosquito-borne diseases in America like, oh, West Nile virus, it would be attacked with DDT. Except that they use synthetic pyrethroids which seem to be a better choice than DDT. But now we know that DDT can beat malaria without…

I am the wrong person to answer this email

I am not a fan of homeschooling; in fact, if I had my way, I'd make it illegal. Too often it's an excuse to isolate kids and hammer them full of ideological nonsense, and in a troubled public school system, it doesn't help to strip students and money from a struggling district — it should be part of the social contract that we ought to provide a good education to everyone. Before you start protesting (aw, who am I kidding? Some will be howling in protest anyway) I know that there are good homeschool programs, and I have students who were homeschooled and were better prepared than kids coming…

Mallard Rape

Reposted from the old TfK, in honor of the late, great Greg Beck. Over at Death's Door, there is a certain degree of consternation about the possibility that mallard ducks would be gang raping each other. There is a bunch of confusion wrapped around that so let's start slow. I also wasn't aware that duck's had duck cocks to gangbang with. I never eaten a duck but I've eaten a lot of chicken, and when you buy the chicken in the store and pull out that little pouch of giblets and shit, I've never seen a tiny chicken cock sittin off in there. So, what do duck dicks look like, and why don't you…

Only in Academia

Inside Higher Ed's regular "Quick Takes" feature is chock full of weirdness today. From the "I Thought Mormons Were Nice" file: The Utah Legislature has passed legislation allowing students at public colleges and universities to request that they share rooms only with students who don’t carry concealed weapons, The Salt Lake Tribune. But lawmakers rejected a proposal to allow faculty members to bar guns from their offices or classrooms. The legislation follows a legal dispute in which the University of Utah asserted its right to bar guns from campus — despite Utah’s ban on state entities…

Australopith ancestry clarified

From UC Berkeley: New fossils discovered in the Afar desert of eastern Ethiopia are a missing link between our ape-man ancestors some 3.5 million years ago and more primitive hominids a million years older, according to an international team led by the University of California, Berkeley, and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The fossils are from the most primitive species of Australopithecus, known as A. anamensis, and date from about 4.1 million years ago, said Tim White, a UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology and one of the team's leaders. The hominid Australopithecus…

Blogging conference presentations doesn't break Nature embargo

Added in edit: the original version of this post implied that the Nature editorial was recent, when it was in fact published in February this year; I was sent a link to it today and assumed it was new. I've edited the post to reflect this. One of the major reasons for concern from presenters and conference organisers about the notion of conference bloggers is that having unpublished work discussed online may violate the embargo policies of journals and damage their chances of publication. We do have clarification of this issue from one major journal. Nature has an editorial posted back in…

Dawkins' book is for fence-sitters AND non-fence-sitters!

The latest online edition of Seed Magazine (you all know it's gone to an all-digital format, right? You should be reading it regularly) has an interview with Richard Dawkins on his new book — it focuses on the potential for the new book to persuade people to accept the idea of evolution. I think it does a good job of that, too. They asked me to write a little commentary on the book, and I think it has even wider possibilities. It's so readable and clear, I want some of those die-hard creationist fanatics to read it. Really read it, and understand it. I don't expect them to be converted at all…

Around the Web: Ignoring gurus, sherpas, ninjas, mavens and more

Why I Ignore Gurus, Sherpas, Ninjas, Mavens, and Other Sages Open Access and the Author-Pays Problem: Assuring Access for Readers and Authors in a Global Community of Scholars Tenure-Track Science Faculty and the 'Open Access Citation Effect' Academic Libraries as Data Quality Hubs Writing for Exposure: What Publishers Should Promise When They Aren’t Paying Why We Miss the First Sale Doctrine in Digital Libraries Publishers are reshaping themselves Teaching in a straitjacket (ie. a MOOC) Book publishers blast Amazon's plan to control domain names Unintended Consequences of Journal Ranking…

Why bother having a resume?

I'm not usually a big fan of Seth Godin's guruish pronouncements, but I thought this one was a pretty good encapsulation of what it means to be a public professional or a public academic in the 21st century. In other words, Why bother having a resume? If you don't have a resume, what do you have? How about three extraordinary letters of recommendation from people the employer knows or respects? Or a sophisticated project they can see or touch? Or a reputation that precedes you? Or a blog that is so compelling and insightful that they have no choice but to follow up? And we shouldn't kid…

Reader Poll: Best Science Movies

About a week ago, ScienceBlogger Randy Olson (documentary filmmaker of "Flock of Dodos" fame) left a comment on Shifting Baselines suggesting that the best way to combat anti-science propaganda like "Expelled" is with a pro-science film festival. "Right now, if a high school kid makes a really great video about evolution, where is he or she supposed to send it?" he asked. "And more importantly, the presence of such a festival becomes an incentive to draw new talent into the subject." Chad agrees, but makes the bold suggestion that bloggers could organize such a festival online. The issue got…

Beer in Zero Gravity

Last Friday, NASA released a report on astronaut health care that revealed two incidents of on-the-job alcohol abuse. Even though NASA rules forbid drinking alcohol while in orbit, a New Scientist article published online on Tuesday suggests that a few astronauts have done it (including Buzz Aldrin, who sipped communion wine from a chalice after landing on the Moon). But in a zero-gravity environment, could an astronaut (or a space tourist) really enjoy beer's frothy bubbles? Yes, explains the New Scientist article: The answer, Dutch researchers suggested in 2000, is to store beer in a…

Clockwise or counter-clockwise?

Gray Birds Cover 40,000 Miles Annually: "Sooty shearwaters may not look like much, but when it comes to travel they put marathoners, cyclists and pretty much everyone else to shame. These gray, 16-inch birds cover 40,000 miles annually in search of food, the longest migration ever recorded electronically, according to a report in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences." How does that compare to Arctic Terns and their pole-to-pole migration? Or the east-west migration of some ptarmigans from Scandinavia to Kamtchatka and back? "The birds, which can have…

Monkey see, monkey do

Chimpanzees Can Transmit Cultural Behavior To Multiple 'Generations': Transferring knowledge through a chain of generations is a behavior not exclusive to humans, according to new findings by researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University and the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. For the first time, researchers have shown chimpanzees exhibit generational learning behavior similar to that in humans. Unlike previous findings that indicated chimpanzees simply conform to the social norms of the group, this study shows behavior and traditions can be passed along…

Carnivalia, blog business, etc.

Carnival of the Liberals is up at Capitol Annex Skeptics' Circle 101 is up at Ionian Enchantment. You may have noticed the Friend Feed widget on the sidebar. I've added this as a sort of "mini-blog", where we can post brief links or stories. I'd say it's just out of beta at this point, but it seems to be working out. I'll probably post links and carnivals there from now on. You may also have noticed the HONcode badge on the left sidebar. We receive our HONcode certification several weeks ago. We do our best to comply with the HONcode principles, which you can read about on their website…

Tet Zoo picture of the day # 5

Apologies to all for total lack of proper posts recently - I am just too busy. However, several posts will - in theory - appear very soon, and I hope that they will prove really, really interesting (especially to people interested in our views on the diversity of extant mammals. And please don't try and guess: I'm not telling). The theme for today's picture of the day is, obviously, rhinos.. again. This photo shows a Ceratotherium simum, the animal that (for an as-yet-unknown reason) we call the White rhino (and, no, that stuff about 'white' being a corruption of 'wide', 'wijd', 'weit' or…

Now, this is Open Science!

One by one, brave people are opening up science, serving as examples of how things can and should be done openly with no ill consequences. Today - examples of two such pioneers. First, Bryan Perkins published his research on his blog. Go and read it and post comments, ask questions, help him improve the work. If the feedback is good, who knows, he may submit it to a peer-reviewed journal. In any case, it is much better for data to be out in the open, available to anyone who knows how to use Google search, than gathering dust in some manila folder. Second, Darren Begley, a graduate student at…

How to get scientists to adopt web 2.0 technologies - Obligatory Reading of the Day

Eva Amsen: How to get scientists to adopt web 2.0 technologies: Many, if not most, scientists are not in the habit of putting things online. The ones that are might be tempted by the concept of sharing the papers they read, letting everyone look at their lab notebook, joining a forum or writing a blog. If you're reading this in your RSS feed or clicked through from FriendFeed, you're probably one of those people. But think about your friends and colleagues who only turn on their computer for work and e-mail. They're not going to tag their favourite papers or discuss the process of research…

Pseudo-moving!

Well, I was busy with work and everything, but behind the scenes, Mrs.Coturnix took some vacation time and started completely re-doing our apartment with a help of two of her best friends. It already looks better than ever and feels great, but it is not done yet. Oh, no. This weekend, we'll be taking the cats to the vet, kids and the dog to Grandma's house, bringing in a truck and loading all of our stuff on it so people can come in on Monday and Tuesday and paint, replace the carpets and vinyl floors, etc., so we can move back in on Tuesday night. I'll be going back and forth between…

ScienceOnline2010 session videos - Science and Entertainment Part 4

Science and Entertainment: Beyond Blogging Saturday, January 16 at 2 - 3:05pm D. Science and Entertainment: Beyond Blogging - Tamara Krinsky and Jennifer Ouellette Description: Over the past several years, the Internet has tangibly changed the way that movies and TV shows are produced and marketed. Blogs will call out ridiculous scientific errors found in stories and the critique can go viral very quickly; therefore, science advising is on the rise in an attempt to add some semblance of plausibility to your favorite flicks. As tools on the web continue to evolve, filmmakers and television…

ScienceOnline2010 session videos - Science and Entertainment Part 3

ScienceOnline2010 session videos - Science and Entertainment Part 2

ScienceOnline2010 session videos - Science and Entertainment Part 1

ScienceOnline2010 session videos - Science and Entertainment Part 6

ScienceOnline2010 session videos - Science and Entertainment Part 5

Skype backdoor

The popular VOIP Skype has a backdoor for bugging h/t Steve at Information Processing A German online tech source reports that Skype has a hidden backdoor on its encryption protocol enabling third party bugging of conversations. Info was leaked by Austrian police. Backdoor is presumably there at the request of European regulators, if not, Skype could be in serious trouble with the EU. Backdoor is presumably shared with the US authorities, specially since they are now US owned... Skype is very popular internationally as a quasi-free Voice-Over-Internet-Phone application. Skype was founded in…

Friday Fun: Entire Facebook Staff Laughs As Man Tightens Privacy Settings

Priceless, just priceless. PALO ALTO, CA--All 1,472 employees of Facebook, Inc. reportedly burst out in uncontrollable laughter Wednesday following Albuquerque resident Jason Herrick's attempts to protect his personal information from exploitation on the social-networking site. "Look, he's clicking 'Friends Only' for his e-mail address. Like that's going to make a difference!" howled infrastructure manager Evan Hollingsworth, tears streaming down his face, to several of his doubled-over coworkers. "Oh, sure, by all means, Jason, 'delete' that photo. Man, this is so rich." According to…

It's a little late for an apology to Alan Turing

But the sentiment is worthy. There is a petition you can sign asking the British government to express some public remorse for what was done to Alan Turing. I'm sure you all know who he was, but just in case… Alan Turing was the greatest computer scientist ever born in Britain. He laid the foundations of computing, helped break the Nazi Enigma code and told us how to tell whether a machine could think. He was also gay. He was prosecuted for being gay, chemically castrated as a 'cure', and took his own life, aged 41. The British Government should apologize to Alan Turing for his treatment…

Fornvännen's Winter Issue On-Line

With Fornvännen's summer issue on its way from the printers to subscribers, we have published the full contents of last winter's issue on-line (2011:4). This is one of the rare cases where no women have contributed papers, but it's good stuff anyway. Robin Lindblad on why axes were depicted on Bronze Age rock carvings. Michael Schneider on the landscape / societal background to Broby place names. Helmer Gustavson & J.O.H. Swantesson give three newish runic inscriptions with the early futhark the full philological treatment. Andreas Wiberg & Anders Wikström on geophys mapping of a…

Go

I used to play Go at university and after, but rather dropped out when I had children. Recently I've started playing online again, though its a somewhat inhuman way of playing. One of the themes of those times was that computers were rubbish at Go, in contrast their chess performance (one of the problems is that its pretty hard to evaluate a go position, particularly at the start, by any kind of counting. In chess (I think) you can count pieces and locations pretty quickly). So of course we Go players took that as clear proof that Go was a more interesting game :-) The Economist has a little…

I'll Take "Hobbies Less Acceptable Than Blogging" for $1000, Alex

Via Inside Higher Ed, a professor in New Jersey took the whole social media thing to the next level: A Fairleigh Dickinson University physics professor is in custody for allegedly running a prostitution website involving about 200 women and more than 1,200 johns, police said Monday. David Flory of New York City, who teaches on the FDU-Metropolitan campus in Teaneck, was arrested Sunday while sitting in a Starbucks in Albuquerque, N.M., said Lt. William Roseman of the Albuquerque police. Flory, who ran the site mostly from New York, owned a vacation home in Santa Fe, N.M., Roseman said. Flory…

Easing Swedish Metal Detector Restrictions

Restrictions on the use of metal detectors vary from country to country. In England, they are too lax. In Sweden, they are too strict. In Denmark, they are pretty much just right. As I've written before, I think everybody would stand to gain if the Swedish restrictions were eased. My idea is that we should treat metal detectors as hunting weapons: anybody who can demonstrate sufficient knowledge of rules and best practice should be licenced by the county authorities to use the instrument, and then allowed to continue doing so until they prove unfit. (Currently, all amateurs are considered…

Early Voyages of Discovery

Here's something pretty cool recommended by my amateur archaeologist and fellow honorary Chinese buddy Jerry Helliker: The Hakluyt Society. "The Hakluyt Society seeks to advance knowledge and education by the publication of scholarly editions of primary records of voyages, travels and other geographical material. Membership of the Society is strongly recommended to anybody interested in the history of exploration and travel, exploratory voyages, geographical discovery and worldwide cultural encounter." The Society's latest publication is The Guiana Travels of Robert Schomburgk 1835-1844,…

Prominent Lawyer Backs Away from Coleman Recount Team

Both Norm Coleman (R, Incumbant) and Al Franken have set up legal oversight teams for the impending recount in the Minnesota Senatorial race. However, Coleman's lawyer is regisning from the team. Acorrding to the West Central Tribune Online, Coleman's campagin ... ... announced Wednesday evening that former U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger, a Republican, would oversee the recount for Coleman. But Heffelfinger removed himself Thursday morning, saying he had to focus on guiding a city of St. Paul review of law enforcement practices during the Republican National Convention. "I have realized…

Film Festival Query

Having suggested an on-line pro-science film festival a little while ago, I should report that there are discussions underway (or at least in the works) about trying to make something happen. If it goes anywhere, it may look different than the original suggestion, but I'm kind of curious about one aspect of the original idea. If you recall, my original suggestion was that we could arrange a film festival using YouTube for the submission and distribution of entries, and basically passing the hat to get a prize pool. I still sort of like the idea of funding it via direct contributions rather…

May Berenbaum answers your questions about DDT

This week, Public Radio International is hosting a forum whereby you- the fine people of the General Public- get a chance to converse online with eminent entomologist May Berenbaum about all things DDT. The forum accompanies a piece from last week's "The World".Â For background, you can read Berenbaum's recent Washington Post essay about the DDT-malaria problem here: What people aren't remembering about the history of DDT is that, in many places, it failed to eradicate malaria not because of environmentalist restrictions on its use but because it simply stopped working. Insects have a…

Natural Selection and History

An interesting looking paper has just appeared online by John Beatty and Eric Cyr Desjardins that looks at the importance of history in determining form. The abstract reads: In “Spandrels,” Gould and Lewontin criticized what they took to be an all-too-common conviction, namely, that adaptation to current environments determines organic form. They stressed instead the importance of history. In this paper, we elaborate upon their concerns by appealing to other writings in which those issues are treated in greater detail. Gould and Lewontin’s combined emphasis on history was three-fold. First,…

At Skeptical Inquirer Online, Moving Beyond Gore's Message

Conventional wisdom pegs 2007 as the long awaited tipping point in waking the American public up to the urgency of global warming. Yet as I review in my latest "Science and the Media" column at Skeptical Inquirer Online, such optimism runs up against the reality of public opinion. Despite Gore's breakthrough success with Inconvenient Truth, American opinion today is little different from when the film premiered in May 2006. Gore has done a very good job of intensifying the beliefs of audiences who were already concerned about climate change, but a deep perceptual divide between partisans…

Possessed: Parasite Video and Powerpoint

Well, the talk at Cornell last week went very well. Thanks to everyone who came. If you want to hear me wax rhapsodic about parasite manipulations (and explain how scientists study their evolution), you're in luck. Cornell has put the video of the talk online. The image is pretty small on the screen, so I decided to post the slide show on my web site here. I suggest opening two screens and advancing the slides as the talk progresses. At first the sound is a little scratchy on the video and the light balance takes a while to get properly adjusted. But don't give up--it evens out. You may also…

Invisible Gladiators in the Petri Dish Coliseum

Over the past few months I've been working on a book on Escherichia coli (more on that later). To get a feel for how scientists work with the bug, I've been spending some time at the lab of Paul Turner at Yale. He sets up experiments to observe microbes evolve. His lab is full of freezers and incubators and flasks full of suspicious goo. One of his students gave me my first Petri dish of E. coli, which I brought home and put by my desk, where I could observe the colonies spread and then fade. In addition to his work on Escherichia coli, Turner also studies viruses called phi-six that infect…

Bloggers are people too

You may know by now what Kathy Sierra, a wonderfully smart blogger at CPU, has gone through. She has been the target of disturbing and sexually loaded comments, images with death threats. She is a writer I greatly admire. She and her team has done more with her books and her blog to raise the level of discourse in IT than anyone in the recent past. It is a loss to see her withdraw because of a few people who are psychotic, demented and cowardly to exhibit their perversion online anonymously. All social interactions have a code of conduct, explicit in some cases, implicit in many others.…

Out to Sea

I've kinda missed hurricane blogging--even though you readers seem to enjoy fights over "intelligent design" much more. In any case, here are hurricanes Gordon and Helene, drifting harmlessly out to sea (though Helene might still have a few surprises in store). In general, it's been that kind of year, folks. All the really dramatic hurricane action has been in the Pacific. At this point, it's possible that the U.S. may get an entire year-long reprieve from major hurricane threats; that Ernesto will wind up being our worst 2006 landfalling storm. That certainly would be nice. Meanwhile, I'm…

Do we need another dumb Texan for president?

This is awful: Rick Perry's Texas A&M Transcript is now available online. He was a pre-vet student in college? Unbelievable. This is a fellow wobbling between a C- and a C+ average from term to term. As an advisor, I would have taken this poor student aside in his second year and explained to him that veterinary school is really, really hard to get into — even harder than medical school — and with his grades he didn't stand a chance of getting in, and even worse, he demonstrated no aptitude at all for the field. I would have recommended that he switch majors and pursue some field that…

Robert Hooke's long lost notes published online

The Royal Society has just put Robert Hooke's folio online. The 320-year-old notebook, which had been missing for centuries, was discovered in January of last year. In it, Hooke provides details of his experiments, and of the workings of the newly-formed Royal Society, of which he was first administrator and then secretary. Hooke was a contemporary - and a rival - of Isaac Newton. He was a polymath who made major contributions to many scientific disciplines, including astronomy, palaeontology, physics, and biology. For example, he was one of the first people to examine cells under the…

Bronze pigeons who "tweet" Tweets

An urban art installation proposal by Nick Rodrigues would install sculpted pigeons in Cambridge, MA, each equipped with a "pico projector" that would project a live Tweet stream. According to the Artsake blog, "Gossiping Birds" is a proposal by Nick Rodrigues (MCC Sculpture/Installation Fellow '07), one of ten artists chosen as finalists for a Public Art Commission in Cambridge, an initiative of the Cambridge Arts Council. The project called for site-specific public art proposals for the Cambridge Street Corridor, a one-mile stretch from Inman Square to Lechmere that spans three distinct…

The technological rapture

This month's issue of IEEE Spectrum Online magazine contains an excellent special report on the singularity, the hypothetical point in time at which technology will be sufficiently advanced so as to enable the human race to transcend their biology and take their evolution into their own hands. Some transhumanists envision a future characterized by cyborg-like beings and thinking machines with superhuman artificial intelligence, and await the singularity as eagerly as end-timers wait for the Second Coming. Some go as far as to say that we will one day be able to cheat death by uploading our…

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