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Michael Cortese uses personal vendetta to deprive SSA of much needed funds

As you know, as part of a fund raiser for the Secular Student Alliance, I wrote a novella called Sungodogo, which I've since made available on Amazon for the Kindle (and in other formats ... I'll have a print version in January some time). The book is about a handful of people who travel across the Congo in search of an elusive primate. What they find instead is quite unexpected. Yes, there are elusive primates but not at all what was expected. The story then becomes the origin story for the modern Skeptics and Secular Movements, and explains the rise of anti-feminist haters like those of…

Links for 2010-11-18

Confessions of a Community College Dean: Mini-Me "Fans of cheesy-bad movies will remember Mini-me as Dr. Evil's sidekick/mascot in the Austin Powers movies. Dr. Evil had his share of great lines ("the Diet Coke of evil"), but his true awfulness shone forth in his creation of Mini-Me. Mini-me was exactly how he sounds -- a smaller, but recognizable, version of Dr. Evil himself. I've seen managers hire Mini-me's to help them, and I really have to wonder what they're thinking. It's much smarter to hire your opposites. We all have strengths and weaknesses. Mini-me's have the same strengths and…

Congrats, Phil

First, PZ, now Phil Plait (aka Bad Astronomer) - the science bloggers are starting to invade the pages (online and hardcopy) of Seed Magazine. The lines are blurring. The old media model is crawling slowly towards the ash heap of history....

It's just a Theory....

The new edition (first online edition) of Scope, the MIT Grad Program in Science Writing's student webzine, is out (hat-tip to Tom) with several great articles. Check out, for instance, Words (Just Might) Hurt Me: The Trouble with 'Theory'.

I am Ceiling Cat

tags: Caturday, online quiz My drinking pal and fellow SciBling, John, whom I still would like to see in a speedo, is being a bad boy by posting a silly and nonscientific Caturday survey that you might enjoy (my results are below the fold);

Balko's Column on Gambling Ban

Radley Balko's latest column at Fox News focuses on Frist's ridiculous attempt to ban online gambling. He deftly punctures every one of the false reasons offered in support of the legislation and points out the rank hypocrisy behind the bill.

Tangled Bank #72

The latest Tangled Bank is online at Ouroboros, and it's a big one. I noticed what seemed to be an awful lot of entries whizzing through my mailbox on the way, so I had a suspicion that we were giving Chris a workout with this edition.

Conspiracy theories

The online journal Episteme has a special issue out on conspiracy theories. Examples include God as a conspiracy theory, the 9/11 WTC "controlled demolition" theory and questions of rationality of those who engage in them. Late note: This is a subscription journal.

Free issue of Annual Review of Anthropology

The 2007 Annual Review of Anthropology has just been published, and is freely available online. It includes reviews called The Archaeology of Religious Ritual, The Archaeology of Sudan and Nubia, Genomic Comparisons of Humans and Chimpanzees and Anthropology and Militarism. 

Lessig's Wireside Chat

In Cambridge, at a "Wireside chat" on "Fair Use, Politics, and Online Video" by legal scholar, IP expert and corrupt-government critic Lawrence Lessig. He's comparing the addictivity/potential danger of wifi to smoking. Say it ain't so! I need my wifi!

Emotion Study

Jeremy Dean of PsyBlog is doing another online study, this time on emotions, and he needs participants. So if you have about 10 minutes, and you'd like to participate in some real live research, click here and follow his instructions.

Davies on six studies of deaths in Iraq

Nicholas Davies has an article Estimating civilian deaths in Iraq - six surveys in Online Journal. Critics often point to the Iraq Body Count and the Iraq living conditions survey as contradicting the Lancet study when they do not. Davies explains why.

Mooney seminar at Crooked Timber

Over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin has organised an on-line seminar on Chris Mooney's War on Science. Lots of interesting reading, including two guest posters: someone called Tim Lambert and Steve Fuller. PZ Myers wasn't real impressed with Fuller's contribution.

No interracial marriage guy video

He makes the argument that what he does is legal. It probably is. But he is still a dickwad. Watch CBS News Videos Online Being mixed race = being drunk or being on drugs. Oh, and Bobby Jindal proves himself a moron once again.

Bernie Madoff on Frontline

You can watch the new Frontline documentary on Bernie's fraud online. If you're a Madoff-junkie, like I am, absolutely nothing new in terms of substance. But, it is really striking how much Fairfield Greenwich was run by total bullshit artists.

What 'Bout Them Libertarians?

Hmmm, after a whole week of fantastic traffic, it has suddenly gone down through the floor today, so I better act quickly and post something really provocative - an old anti-Libertarian screed that is bound to attract trolls (and traffic).... Much of the stuff on this blog is based on the bimodal (bipolar?) view of the world: there are Conservatives and there are Liberals, and that's it. Lakoff, Ducat, Frank and the like spend much time explaining the two, or just trying to explain the strange Conservative animals to the Liberals. But, as I stated before, only about a third of Americans are…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Leah D. Gordon

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Leah D. Gordon from MEASURE Evaluation to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your…

How can global health funding be better coordinated?

It seems simple enough – a proliferation of donors in global health means more money to solve some of the world’s most pressing health issues. Right? Not exactly. A lot of new evidence is coming out that suggests that the lack of coordination of different funding sources can be a burden and perhaps a detriment to global health. And the way that traditional funders think about the locus of health spending in countries to which they donate may not even be entirely accurate. As a recent report from the Center for Global Development In fact, as the report finds, most funding for health is…

"Science" kits that teach stereotypes.

It's the time of year when the mailbox starts filling up with catalogues. At the Free-Ride house, many of these are catalogues featuring "educational" toys and games. Now, some of these toys and games are actually pretty cool. Others, to my mind, are worse than mere wastes of money. For your consideration, three "science" kits targeted at girls: Archimedes got scientific insight from a bathtub, but he wasn't required to wear eye-makeup to do it. Spa Science The kit offers itself as a way "to cultivate a girl's interest in science" through the making of "beauty products like an oatmeal…

Friday Fractal XIX

The other day, I put up a small question about history. What better place could there be to put my answer, but in the form of a fractal? Patterns seem to almost repeat themselves. Sweeping changes result from a single, initial circumstance. Each point is connected to another, within the same set. Are these descriptions of events in history, or the rules defining a rippled Julia set? Or perhaps the rings of a tree? The trunk of a cottonwood tree, showing rings formed over many years. Cottonwood trees (below) line the bank of Walnut Creek, which appealed to Sarah H. Church when she arrived…

AAAS 2010 meeting - the Press Room....why?

I arrived in San Diego on Thursday night and checked in my hotel that was 6 miles away, almost in Mexico - I could see the lights of Tijuana from the hotel. I had to take a cab each morning and evening. On Friday morning, I got up bright and early and came to the convention center, lugging my huge and heavy laptop with me. And that was the first surprise of the day - there was no wifi anywhere in the Convention Center, and almost no power outlets anywhere: something I am not used to as the meetings I tend to go to are pretty techie and take care of such details. Not even speakers/panelists…

Birds in the News 167

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter The only egg known to be collected by Charles Darwin, recently rediscovered. Image: University of Cambridge. Birds and American Law The American Federation of Aviculture Inc. (AFA), the Avicultural Society of America (ASA) and the National Animal Interest Alliance (NAIA) issued an action alert together that opposes H.R. 669, a bill banning most nonnative animals in the United States. "H.R. 669 is an 'anti-animal bill'. There is no amendment that can fix this bill," states the action alert. H.R. 669 is a bill that…

Browsing biology on the web: NextBio

Last year p-ter put up a post pointing to useful online tools such as Haplotter. One of the great things about biology today is that so much of the data from genomics is being thrown out there within reach of the plebs. And a lot of value is being added through user interfaces which smooth the connection between you and these databases. So check out NextBio; from the FAQ: NextBio is a life science search engine that enables researchers and clinicians to access and understand the world's life sciences information. With NextBio, in just one click you can search through tens of thousands of…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Microbes Compete With Animals For Food By Making It Stink: Microbes may compete with large animal scavengers by producing repugnant chemicals that deter higher species from consuming valuable food resources, a new study suggests. Ecologists have long recognized microbes as decomposers and pathogens in ecological communities. But their role as classic consumers who produce chemicals to compete with larger animals could be an important and common interaction within many ecosystems, according to a paper published this week in the journal Ecology Decoded Sea Urchin Genome Shows Surprising…

SciAm on Expelled

First Fox News, now Scientific American gives Expelled both barrels. They dedicated a fair amount of space to ripping into the movie, and you might be wondering if it isn't giving the movie more publicity than it deserves, a question I'm getting asked a lot, too. Of course it is! The controversy is exactly what they want, since it will help put butts in seats. However, this is bad publicity, and what serves our ends is that people see the movie skeptically, and are made aware of the fundamental dishonesty of the makers. John Rennie notes this problem: Rather, it seems a safe bet that the…

Scientific Red Cards: a good idea or opening a hornet's nest?

From The Scientist: Flagging fraud: A team of French life sciences grad students has launched an online repository of fraudulent scientific papers, and is calling on researchers to report studies tainted by misconduct. The website -- called Scientific Red Cards -- is still in a beta version, but once it's fully operational it should help the scientific community police the literature even when problems slip past journal editors, the students claim. The database might also prevent researchers from citing papers that they don't even realize are fraudulent, said Claire Ribrault, a PhD student in…

A useful confession

This week's Nature has a short report on the Gonzalez tenure affair. It has an interesting admission from Gonzalez. Gonzalez, who has been at Iowa State in Ames since 2001, was denied tenure on 9 March. He is now appealing the decision on the grounds that his religious belief, not the quality of his science, was the basis for turning down his application. "I'm concerned my views on intelligent design were a factor," he says. His "views on intelligent design" were his "religious belief"? OK, that's good enough for me. No tenure. It also includes comments from Bob Park, which reflect my own…

Attempt at Human Bird-Like Flight

John Childs is the very first person to fly in America. He did it in 1757, on September 13th, from the steeple of the Old North Church in Boston. This is the same church from which Sarah Palin hung some lanterns to direct Michel Bachmann on her ride to Concord New Hampshire to warn the British that we were "Not going to take it any more." Childs tied himself to a glider made of bird feathers, and he did it a three times in a row, firing off guns the third time, but he caused such a distraction that he got banned from doing it again. Based on the description of the event, Childs was really…

New Open Access Journal

From a Press Release: Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association and Cambridge University Press launch new Open Access journal The Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA) and Cambridge University Press announced today the launch of the APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing - a groundbreaking new Open Access journal that will serve as an international forum for signal and information processing researchers across a broad spectrum of research, ranging from traditional modalities of signal processing to emerging areas. APSIPA…

I Thought We Solved This NSA Thing Long Ago

Or, at least, I'm surprised that this earlier implemented solution has not been mentioned in all the discussion about NSA spying. Richard Stallman invented an approach to obviating the NSA's attempts to spy on email. He included it in emacs, the world's greatest text editor. Here how it works, from the manual. The "M" is the "alt" key (for all practical purposes) and "M-x followed by a word implements the command attached to that word. 32.6 Mail Amusements M-x spook adds a line of randomly chosen keywords to an outgoing mail message. The keywords are chosen from a list of words that…

Alsengem Found in Sweden

Lund Alsengems are little multilayered button-like discs of coloured glass with incised human stick-figures on one side. Archaeology became aware of them in 1871 when one was found on the Danish island of Als. These gems are pretty coarse and ugly compared to the exquisite agate and intaglio ones of Classical antiquity, but they nevertheless have their place in an archaeologist's heart. Sigtuna On the Continent, Alsengems are found as part of church art of the 11th through 13th centuries such as reliquaries, book covers and altar crosses. Their core area is the Netherlands, Lower Saxony and…

Arsenic poisoning from kelp supplements

From a news release by the University of California at Davis: The new study, published in this month's issue of Environmental Health Perspectives - available online at www.ehponline.org - was prompted by the case of a 54-year-old woman who was seen at the UCD Occupational Medicine Clinic following a two-year history of worsening hair loss, fatigue and memory loss. Seafood is our primary source of arsenic in the food supply and we all have detectable arsenic in our blood after a plate of oysters. But this case was particularly disturbing: Over a period of several months, the woman's short-…

A 3D Tour of the Fruit Fly Brain

Inspired by my earlier posting on the fruit fly brain: I received a nice "holiday gift" from a researcher at the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) in Taiwan, Terry C.-W. Yeh. NCHC and the Brain Research Center at the National Tsing Hua University created the FlyCircuit database. This 32 second video gives you a 3D tour of the various components of the fruit fly brain integrating data collected using more than 16,000 individual neurons - a startling example, to me, of the wonderment of science as a product of bridging computer science, molecular biology and neuroscience…

The Tribune notices that Haley's yanked OSR#1 from the market

On Friday, I noted an e-mail circulating around the Internet in which disgraced University of Kentucky chemist and card-carrying general in the mercury militia, Boyd Haley, announced that he was suspending sales of his industrial chelator turned "antioxidant dietary supplement" OSR#1. Now, true to form, Trine Tsouderos at the Chicago Tribune has noticed and published a story on Haley's decision, Controversial supplement to come off shelves: Pharmacies are halting sales of OSR#1, a compound marketed as a dietary supplement to parents of children with autism, six weeks after the U.S. Food and…

Welcome!

This is a website by, for, and about some of the most inspiring young people in the world: the finalists of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. This year over 1400 finalists from over 60 countries will arrive in Albuquerque, New Mexico for a week of socializing, learning, competition, and fun. In keeping with the theme of this year's Fair, "Creating a New Element," Intel and ScienceBlogs.com are creating a new ISEF community website that will expand upon and continue the Fair's incredible tradition of international camaraderie and collaboration. Starting the week of Intel…

Reddit interviews me

The interview in which I answered the top 10 questions submitted by Reddit readers is now online, and it's right here. I haven't watched it. I can never bear to see myself in these things. You'll have to tell me if I said something stupid.

Blogrolling - added today

I don't know why the big boys are purging their blogrolls. I prefer to grow mine: Spheroid A Geocentric View Drawing The Motmot (classic archives) Drawing The Motmot (current) The Easthom Page Harter Learning Jim Buie's blog An Online Communities Blog Robots Will Take Over!

Janet live-blogs her mammogram

It seems to be an evolving tradition around here to put descriptions of our medical adventures online. Janet contributes with a an account of her recent mammogram. I was disappointed — there are no pictures. Hey! I'm scheduled to have a colonoscopy late next month! Shall I…?

All Billy All the Time

Fourth Billy Bragg podcast is online here Ah, 1984, a Good Year. Life's A Riot With Spy vs Spy segways to Brewing Up With Billy Bragg. He is also Live blogging his road tour.. Now I am really sorry I missed the Golden Gate concert. Wah.

How Long Could You Survive if Trapped in your own Home?

tags: How long can you survive if trapped in your own home, online quiz, fun and games I have a few questions; who would eat a pet if they were trapped inside their own home? And, is it possible to eat your couch and survive?

Where Do You Lie Along the Political Spectrum?

tags: online quiz, American politics It appears that I am a social liberal-progressive .. that makes more sense than simply branding me as a "liberal" since I have some rather sharp disagreements with liberals who aren't progressives .. Where do you lie along this political spectrum?

Septic arguments

Thanks to R for pointing out a list of every skeptic argument encountered online as well as how often each argument is used. Clear winner is "the sun" but its nice to see that old chestnut of 1970's cooling still in there at number 7.

Clangers say no to Global Warming

See here for Oliver Postgates view on Global warming. And what he has to say about childrens TV is good too. This because he put an advert in the Grauniad yesterday (which I can't find online; but I can find a story about it).

More Fuller

Some people, after seeing the recent Dover documentary (now available online), have been wondering who the heck this Steve Fuller wanker is, and why he's defending Intelligent Design. Here's a philosopher to explain Fuller to you. You'll wish you hadn't asked.

The Burgeoning Offense-Taking Industry

Tom Cavanaugh has a wonderful article at Reason Online about the ever-growing cabal of organizations that exist solely to take offense at how their group is portrayed. What sparked this? How about a proposed law in Hungary outlawing blonde jokes. No, that's not a joke.

A vote of confidence!

See, Larry Moran approves of my column in Seed — I'll mention when it is available online, but you'd have it already if you subscribed…and this is also the perfect time to give a gift subscription. (I know, I'm such a shameless pitchman.)

Saturday links

Christopher Taylor on the evolution of insect wings Get your fix of the Daily Parasite. Remember Phase IV, the classic '70s ant sci-fi film?  You can now watch the entire movie online. Macromite is back. Entomologists telling jokes, at Bug Girl's blog.

Original Apollo images online

The School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE) here at ASU has joined forces with NASA to scan the original Apollo images of the Moon and to place them online for the general public. See here. [Hat tip to /. for the link]

Following ICWSM Remotely

Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media is being held right now in DC. Use both twitter hash tags: #icwsm2010 and #icwsm. The papers are online at: http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM10/schedConf/presentations.

Ocean Survivor

The Pew Environment Group and the Conserve Our Ocean Legacy Campaign just launched the new online game Ocean Survivor. It is designed to draw attention to the perils of overfishing and provide people with an opportunity to sign a petition to make a difference.