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What questions do you want to ask John Hawks on Sunday?

John Hawks is one of the nation's leading palaeoanthropologists, and has lately been working with ancient DNA, recent and earlier Human Evolution, and an interesting project that is a sort of casting call for extinct humans and their relatives. Most of you know John from his famous Internet site called "John Hawks Weblog: Paleoanthropology, Genetics and Evolution." John is an associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, which is one of the better known and respected for this sort of research. Unless you've been living in a cave, you know that there are many…

Your help is needed: Climate Science Legal Defense Fund

The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund continues to receive donations and offers of help from various stakeholders. We are actively working with several organizations in order to make CSLDF a one-stop resource for scientists looking for legal resources and we are currently pursuing several educational and legal initiatives which will be made public in the future. In the short-term, CSLDF would greatly appreciate your financial support to help Dr. Michael Mann. Funds are needed to: 1. Fend-off ATI's demand to take Dr. Mann's deposition, which is a blatant attempt to harass and intimidate…

Bye-bye, Lileks

As a small tremor in a bit of a staff shakeup at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, James Lileks got the axe — he's been demoted from a guy with a regular column to a beat reporter. It's about time. He's not a bad writer, in the sense that he does have his own recognizable voice, but yeesh, he's such a banal writer, the epitome of Minnesota mediocrity. Some of his online writings are cranky-grandpa interesting, the rantings of a deranged 9/11 wingnut, but his newspaper column … dull, dull, dull. You only need to read one column in your life about a guy who goes shopping at Target and watches TV…

Elsevier Spams Journal Contributors With Offer Of Language Revision

A few months ago I registered on Elsevier's clunky old on-line manuscript submissions site and submitted a paper to Journal of Archaeological Science. It got turned down because the two peer reviewers disagreed on whether it should be accepted or not. No biggie: I resubmitted elsewhere. Today Elsevier Science & Technology Journals spammed the address I submitted from with an offer of language revision! Need help getting published? Elsevier Language services can help you Dear Dr. Martin Rundkvist, Could expert language editing improve your chances of getting published? • Language Editing…

Bits and Bobs

Yesterday I did 5.5 more man-hours of metal detecting at the "Hall of Odin" site in Västmanland with Per Vikstrand. No prehistoric finds: just a piece of a 15/16/17th century brass cooking pot. Bob Lind's craziness is once more repeated uncritically by a local Scanian newspaper. I had a nice chat with the panel of the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast this morning. At 9 pm EST, i.e. 3 am local time. Which was not a very good idea, seeing as my wife was trying to sleep in the next room. But I think the show will be good. Hear Rebecca Watson say "Suckle the teat of the Mother Goddess"!…

Reader Mug Shot Gallery

Curious about what the Aard regulars look like? I am! If you consider yourself an Aardvarchaeology regular, then please gimme a pic of yourself and I'll put it into this gallery post. If you've got a pic on-line somewhere, just put a link to it in a comment. Otherwise, feel free to email me a pic. Here's Greenman Tim of the Walking the Berkshires blog, touching a canebreak canebrake rattlesnake with a less-than-ten-foot pole. Karen a.k.a. the Ridger keeps the Greenbelt blog. Jan Morén probably speaks Scanian, Sweden's equivalent of a presidential Texas drawl. Dennis of Dust in a Sunbeam is…

Finally On-Line Again

After a bit less than a month's wait our new house is finally on-line! The winter of our off-line discontent dissolvèd made glorious broadband summer. So far only at 11 Mbps when we were promised at least 12, but the ADSL modem isn't currently on the first phone socket, so I hope to eventually be able to squeeze some more bandwidth out of the setup. I now face the slight problem of how our desktop machine will interface with the modem in the long term. I was planning on going wireless to eliminate cables, but so far the USB dongle I bought for the purpose isn't working very well. When it…

Anthro Blog Carnival

The fifty-second Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Greg Laden's blog. Archaeology and anthropology, and all dedicated to the memory of Bertrade de Montfort! The oft-married Count Fulk IV of Anjou was married to the mother of his son in 1089, when the lovely Bertrade caught his eye. According to the chronicler John of Marmoutier, "The lecherous Fulk then fell passionately in love with the sister of Amaury of Montfort, whom no good man ever praised save for her beauty. For her sake, he divorced the mother of Geoffrey II Martel..." Bertrade and Fulk were married, and they became the…

Throwback Thursday: When We Changed The Laws Of Gravity (Synopsis)

“Oh leave the Wise our measures to collate. One thing at least is certain, light has weight. One thing is certain and the rest debate. Light rays, when near the Sun, do not go straight.” -Arthur Eddington While we know full well today that Newtonian gravity is just an approximation to a more correct theory of gravity, you've got to remember that for over 200 years, it was unchallenged as the science that explained the entire Universe. When a simple puzzle -- the orbital mechanics of just one of the planets -- failed to line up with its predictions, it was assumed there was a problem with the…

Watch: Four Gas Giants In Orbit Around Another Star For The First Time (Synopsis)

"The Beta Pic animation looked so cool that we’ve wanted to do more. We wanted to make one that was even more impactful for the audience and could begin to show what one of these systems looks like." -Jason Wang In 2004, humanity was able to take the first direct image of an exoplanet around its parent star by going to infrared wavelengths. Four years later, the system HR 8799 was determined to have three (later upgraded to four) exoplanets orbiting it. They could all not only be imaged, but imaged over time. As the planets continue to move in their orbits, follow-up observations have…

Headlines from the Future: Extrasolar Planets Edition

I got a great "Living in the future" kick out of the headline on the New York Times story about Thursday's big astronomical announcement: First Pictures Taken of Extrasolar Planets. The phrasing of the headline conjures images of pictures of clouds swirling on distant gas giants; alas, the reality is a little more mundane: In scratchy telescope pictures released to the world Thursday in Science Express, the online version of the journal Science, the new planets appear as fuzzy dots that move slightly around their star from exposure to exposure. Astronomers who have seen the new images agreed…

links for 2007-12-07

Cat Macros - Post a comment LOLCat weighs in on the Russian acquisition of LiveJournal. (tags: silly pictures blogs internet) Hey Spot, You've Got Mail - New York Times Dogster: because pets need social networks, too. (tags: dog silly internet society) The A.V. Club's Third Annual Surprisingly Specific Holiday Gift Guide | The A.V. Club "Crap. It's the holiday shopping season again, and you don't want to go the gift certificate route one more time. Also, you've got a friend whose house smells like urine, and another who's constantly complaining about her inability to find adhesive…

links for 2007-11-08

ABC News: Police: Students Used Cookies to Torture "Ill. College Students Accused of Kidnapping, Battery With Freshly Baked Cookies" The world is a strange and disturbing place. (tags: news stupid drugs) mmcirvin: A strange map: UFO sightings in the US Why don't people in the South see UFO's? (tags: space science silly US) The National Geographic Online Store - Remote-controlled Tarantulas "Because their eight legs move separately, be prepared for screams when one scuttles realistically from beneath the table." (tags: animals silly) Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education -…

ERV is eeeeeeeeeervywhere!

Because I am a cliche absent minded scientist, I completely forgot that I had tickets to Austin City Limits this year, until my passes came in the mail like last week :-/ Like, I 'remembered', but I thought it was in October or something... I dunno what my brain was doing... Im too busy in the lab to go anyway, and I am too busy doing fun outreach activities! 1-- Stillwater Public Library, 10 am (central) Saturday 9-17 Need something fun for the kids to do on a rainy, dreary day? Ill be giving a talk to children and their parents about my research (what vaccines are, how they work, and how…

Bad Toasters and Software

Seth Godin offers a parable about toasters and web sites: We recently acquired what might be the worst toaster in the history of the world. It's pretty fancy and shiny and microprocessor controlled. And it makes toast. But here's what I have to do to use it: [list of 10 steps] He goes on to draw a parallel between the excessive demands of his toaster and paying a $6 bill to EBay, which requires 11 clicks. My response: Yes, YES, YES!!! What he said!! There are more examples of this than I can count, starting with the dreadful interface of the new Microsoft Office. The academic "content…

What happens when you ask 90 or so students to share their "wish."

(Speaking of the arts and science divide) a couple weeks ago, I ran a few lab exercises that revolve around the use of software to city planning, especially as it pertains to issues of sustainability (there's even an online version available here). Anyway, since time was limiting and large part of the exercise was active discussion between students, I took the liberty of asking all the students to write their names and Faculty on a nametag. As well, I thought it would be interesting to ask them to place a single wish on that same name tag. The idea being that perhaps you could get a sense…

The failure of the Darwin = Hitler frame

The ICR’s Christine Dao has a review of Expelled online where she states: According to From Darwin to Hitler author Richard Weikart, Hitler saw World War II as a Darwinian struggle for existence, and he justified the practice of eugenics by saying that mankind had "transgressed the law of natural selection" by allowing inferior beings to survive and propagate (Mein Kampf, 1925). Here’s the problem. Dao makes it look like Hitler used the phrase "transgressed the law of natural selection" in Mein Kampf. Problem is, he didn’t. The only mention of "natural selection" in the work is: By reason of…

Coyne on Coulter

Jerry Coyne has a piece in TNR Online on Coulter. Unfortunately, it's subscription only, but (see below) here is a highlight: The real reason Coulter goes after evolution is not because it's wrong, but because she doesn't like it--it doesn't accord with how she thinks the world should be. That's because she feels, along with many Americans, that "Darwin's theory overturned every aspect of Biblical morality." What's so sad--not so much for Coulter as for Americans as a whole--is that this idea is simply wrong. Darwinism, after all, is just a body of thought about the origin and change of…

Guide to Tenure for Black Academics

Via the AWIS Washington Wire, this news of interest to young black academics: In The Black-American's Guide for Winning Tenure - Without Losing Your Soul, authors Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Tracey Laszloffy provide dos, don'ts, advice and support. One of the tips in the Q&A with Rockquemore includes being proactive rather than reactive in creating a professional network of support. She emphasizes the importance of knowing the institution's exact promotion and tenure process, as well as unwritten rules from department-specific norms to whether race can be explicitly discussed. Once the…

More Storm World News

Well, the book has been out for some five months now...but it was just recently reviewed in a top Canadian newspaper, the Toronto Globe & Mail. A quote: ...perhaps the most lasting legacy of Storm World is not its descriptions of hurricane science or politics. Instead, it's Mooney's disgruntled discourse on the misguided practice of scientists who "cling to the antiquated myth that their job is merely to put the 'facts' out there, and nothing more." Mooney goes on: "Scientists can complain all they want, but they'd be better off taking actual measures to prevent and counter it [misuse of…

Storm World Reviewed in WashPost

Read it here. The review is by the New Orleans Times Picayune's Pulitzer winning writer John McQuaid, who is the coauthor of a really great book that helped me a lot with my own research, Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms. Here's an excerpt from McQuaid's review: Storm World is at its most cogent on the author's favorite issue: science in the noisy public square. Many hurricane scientists reacted with dismay when their subtle arguments were distorted by press accounts or used to score partisan points in the political storm that erupted after…

If search strings were writing assignments ...

From time to time I have a look at the search strings that have brought readers to this blog. Looking at some of the recent queries, I can't help but wonder what kind of blog this would be if these described my main focus: sarcastic jokes i do not get it is it a gender thing percentage of academic job applicants are women SJSU layoffs is it bad to email your professor alot I hate academia san diego zoo ethics make a fake diploma of brooklyn college describe the harpy eagle symbiosis objectifying women for a good cause Why are some communities more desirous of control more than other…

Manhattan streets and sun align to create spectacular display

Check out my guest post at the venerable Times Online: Built into the streets of New York City is a solar calendar on a truly massive scale. Every year around July 12th, New Yorkers are treated to a spectacular phenomenon as the setting sun aligns directly with the east-west streets of Manhattan's main grid, turning them into canyons filled with golden light. The effect is known as Manhattanhenge in reference to the much older stone monument near Salisbury. The term was coined in 2002 by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, the charismatic director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American…

The Evolution & Medicine Review

All good medicine is evidence based -- that is, diagnoses and treatments are developed via the scientific method. Oftentimes, evolutionary biology is employed to understand human health and diseases. This is known as evolutionary medicine. Evolutionary medicine is a growing field that takes an interdisciplinary approach toward studying human disease. Tools from population ecology, molecular evolution, comparative anatomy, and many other fields are all integrated with clinical medicine to improve our understanding of human disease and develop new treatments. This approach can be applied to…

Julie MacDonald's legacy

Julie MacDonald was a civil engineer inexplicably appointed to oversee the Fish and Wildlife Service. During her reign, she rewrote the scientific assessments of Interior Department biologists, sent confidential documents to a virtual friend on an online role-playing game and colluded with developers to block endangered species listings. Then just before the Democratic congress got to rake her over the coals, she quit, making her testimony moot. Seven months later, some endangered species rulings she interfered with have been thrown out: The Fish and Wildlife Service reversed seven…

Sciencebloggers amok

After much planning and coordinating, our munificent overlords at Seed arranged to bring a substantial fraction of the gang here at Scienceblogs together in New York last weekend. Beyond the drinking, the carousing, and the karaoke, it was a great chance to see the other Sciblings and talk science, blogging, and to trash the Sciblings who didn't show up. I'll have pictures online in a few days, but for now, Bora has some photographic evidence that I moderated a discussion about science and politics. Rob Knop and PZ Myers sat at a table and got along marvelously. The word "framing" even…

The man behind the myth: Tony's KC

I've dropped out of the Kansas blogging scene in the years since I moved out to California, but I still have fond memories of the other bloggers in the area. Perhaps the most prolific, and undoubtedly the most influential, of the Kansas City bloggers was Tony Botello, of Tony's KC. He's a provocateur, sometimes spinning elaborately bigoted tales that leave readers wondering just how big a jackass he really is, all while skewering local politicians and spinning a personal myth involving living in his mother's basement. Via NYU professor Jay Rosen, I just learned that The KC Pitch Weekly…

The Evil, Imprecise, Confusing Metric System

Yet another alert reader just sent me a link to this extremely humorous blog. It's not recent, but it's silly enough that it's worth pointing out even now. I'm not one hundred percent sure that this isn't a parody. Looking at the blog as a whole, I think it's serious. Pathetic, but serious. According to scientists, The French / Eurotrash "metric" system is in a state of crisis today, as scientists discovered that the weight of the "kilogram" is flip-flopping faster than John McCain at an episcopalian rally. The Kilo - a unit with an identity crisis: This is one of the approximately 30…

Where the Money Is...And Isn't

I'm in the process of composing my annual predictions for 2010, and as those of you who were around for my last set will know, let's just say that my number of hits won't be as high as the previous year (the previous year was weirdly correct, this one more normally imperfect). This is not a serious problem for me, since every year I include the basic disclaimer that there's absolutely no reason why you should believe that my predictions are worth anything, but I do like to be right better than being wrong ;-). The major thing I screwed up was underestimating how successfully the US…

Help redesign myrmecos.net

Myrmecos.net is 5 years old. It has grown from a few dozen photographs to about 4,000, and in recent years 1,500 people visit the site every day. In spite of the site's high profile, myrmecos has not changed in any fundamental way since it first went online in 2003 (archived versions are accessible here). The pages are simple 1990's technology, hand-written in html. There are no underlying databases, just scores of flat files stored in folders. If you do any web design you can imagine what a pain in the behind it is to manage a static site with thousands of individual html files. It is…

New journal on gender, science and technology

Look look, a new journal on gender, science and technology! See the inaugural call for papers below the fold. The International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology is an independent, peer reviewed, open access journal that welcomes contributions from practitioners, researchers and policy makers concerned with gender issues in and of science and technology. The phrase gender, science and technology intends to encompass a wide definition of these disciplines both in terms of methodological enquiry as well as subjects of research. Our aim is to help foster and provide a focus…

Greetings from the People of Earth

The above video montage was kindly produced by multimedia artist and musician Claire L. Evans (of Universe) to open the WSF 2010 panel "The Search for Life in the Universe," which featured the likes of Jill Tarter, David Charbonneau, and Steven Squyres. Unfortunately, due to a production clusterWTF, it didn't end up running. Which is a shame, because I really like its somewhat chilling but still hopeful subtleties. Claire breaks down her motivations for putting together the piece: In 1977, taking advantage of a fortuitous alignment of planets, NASA dispatched two spacecraft named Voyager into…

PBS special on AIDS

I forgot to mention this before it aired, but earlier this week PBS aired a two-part documentary on HIV, The Age of AIDS. It's very good, and according to the website, you can watch it online beginning at 5PM EST today. There's also a lot of information, interviews, etc. on the PBS website linked above.

Maneater

Once upon a time, we got a request to help The Countess in an online poll. For our participation, she agreed to write an erotic horror story with us in mind. It's done! You can now go read Maneater! All yours, for free! It might still be nice if you left some feedback on the story, though.

Where in the World is Coturnix?

If you were amazed the other night to find I was not online for a long time, not blogging, not commenting, not responding to e-mail, not on Facebook, now you know where I was - spreading Brotherhood and Unity in the Triangle area blogging community. And if the same phenomenon happens tonight, here's a hint where I can be found.

What Sort of Christmas Tree Are You?

tags: christmas tree, online quiz This is a cute quiz and you have to let me know what your results were! You Are a Tinsel Tree For you, Christmas is no different than the rest of the year. And this means you do things your own way - and continue to surprise people. What Christmas Tree Are You?

Forward on Climate Rally - February 17, 2013

"Thank you to the nearly 50,000 who demonstrated on Presidents Day Weekend at the Washington Monument, the thousands at 20+ solidarity rallies across the country, and the more than one million online activists who stood up and spoke out to tell President Obama that right now its time to move Forward on Climate."

Anthro Blog Carnival

The sixteenth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Testimony of the Spade. Check it out! Archaeology and anthropology beyond your wildest dreams. "Give yourself over to absolute pleasure Swim the warm waters of sins of the flesh Erotic madness beyond any measure And sensual daydreams to treasure forever" Richard O'Brien

Anthro Blog carnival

The seventy-first Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Neuroanthropology. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology! Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.

Sättuna Fieldwork Report On-Line

I've filed the Sättuna excavation report with the State Board of National Antiquities, the County Archaeologist's office and the County Museum. And I've put it on-line at archive.org. Check it out if you're into the Late Mesolithic! We didn't get much data on the 6th century elite settlement.

Taking over Torpig

In early 2009, a bunch of folks at UCSB took over the Torpig botnet for ten days. In that time, they observed more that 180,000 infections and recorded over 70G of data that the botnet captured. During that time, over 8,000 accounts at financial institutions were "acquired". The report is available online [pdf]

How Readers Scan News in Print and Online

On April 10, the Poynter Institute is set to release it's latest "eye tracking" study of how readers navigate the printed and online news page. The preview of the key findings is fairly suprising. Watch the video about the study at the site, and listen to this NPR Marketplace story on the forthcoming study.

The incredible penis-shrinking gene identified in birds

Find out why most species of birds do not have a penis in this video abstract of new research published yesterday in Current Biology: Source Herrera AM, Shuster SG, Perriton CL, Cohn MJ. Developmental basis of phallus reduction during bird evolution. Current Biology Published online June 6, 2013. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2013.04.062

A dystopian, conflicted art gallerist Jess? Sweet!

OMG! This Chris Beckett story is totally about me! You can read the title story of The Turing Test online, and it's well worth checking out. In a dystopian future, Jessica runs a gallery where art increasingly involves human body parts and is designed to shock and appall bystanders. Now I have to go read it. . . via iO9

Encephalon 49

The 49th edition of Encephalon, which is online now at Neuroscientifically Challenged, includes entries on the limitations of the use of gene therapy for psychiatric disorders, the sensationalization of neuroimaging data by the mass media, and how the relationship between music and movement is manifested in the drumming that accompanies Sudanese martial arts demonstrations.

Friday Cephalopod: Octophotography!

You'd think with all those arms they'd have at least one free to focus and set the exposure. This is a picture taken by an octopus who stole a divers' camera. The diver chased it and got the camera back. Otherwise, we'd be waiting for the octopus to get online and upload the pictures to youtube.

An administrative note

As discussions have heated up, more people have been getting trapped in moderation due to excessive links in their comments. I believe that you can get around that by signing in using TypeKey, using OpenID or various other online authentication systems. Try it (this post is a good testbed!) and let me know if it works, please.

ConvergeSouth05 - Closing Thoughts

So, now that you have a better idea how great it was last year, are you coming to ConvergeSouth this year? On October 14th (yup, one day instead of two). Last year was about journalism and blogging. This year, the theme is "beyond blogging", both technologically (podcasting, vlogging) and socially (building communities, etc.). I am especially interested in the Facebook session (you may have heard already that Facebook opened its doors to non-"edu" e-mail addresses today) and hope that there will be a lot of young users of Facebook there telling us how they think about it instead of us old…

#scio10 Science Online 2010 recollections and reflections on the sessions I attended

Last weekend I attended Science Online 2010, which is a conference of science communicators with a heavy mix of bloggers, many journalists and others from the print industry, an increasingly large number of book authors, and OpenX (X=access, notebook, science, or whatever) advocates and practitioners. Science Online is now reaching a tipping point. It is a fantastic conference partly because of its small size and its focus, but it is now becoming much more popular, and faces the possibility of growing over the next couple of years to become not what it is today. Perhaps it will evolve into a…

LOL Covert Ops?

It's bad enough that a plane which previously made non-stop flights from the continental U.S. to Guantanamo Bay crashed in the Yucatan with tons of cocaine aboard. What's even more ridiculous is the 'cover' story. The plane was owned by Donna Blue Aircraft which is in the business of "Aircraft Consultance and Sales." According to Boing Boing: Mad Cow Morning News visited the owners of the plane, "Donna Blue Aircraft Inc" of Coconut Beach FL., and discovered that it's an "empty office suite with a blank sign out front." There was no sign of Donna Blue Aircraft, Inc., at the address listed at…