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Anthro Blog Carnival

The twenty-ninth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Remote Central. Archaeology and anthropology gonna be fun, gonna be fun, gonna be fun in de sun! The next open hosting slot is on 27 February. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me. No need to be an anthro pro.

Anthro Blog Carnival

The twentyfirst Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Archaeolog. Check it out! Archaeology and anthropology to make you squeal and titter with delight. There's an open hosting slot on 26 September 10 October and further ones later in the fall. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me.

A Few Words from Our Senior Middle East Correspondent

I've been sticking to my "no Internet before writing something" quota fairly well the last several days, with a couple of exceptions: 1) writing or no writing, I read a bunch of RSS feeds on my phone when I'm putting SteelyKid to bed at night, and 2) I keep following events in the Middle East via Al Jazeera online, mostly their live blogging from Libya. It's fascinating to watch. Of course, this blog also has an official Senior Middle East Correspondent, namely my friend Paul, who is a journalist based in Cairo. When the Egyptian revolution started, he was out of the country on a family…

Marylanders!

You have a couple of bills working their way through the state house that offer aid and comfort to the Intelligent Design wackos. You don't want that, do you? If you live in Maryland, are a scientist, teacher, or dependent on science research, sign the online petition to oppose these nasty little bills. Work fast, too, you don't have much time.

Image Gallery Down

Smugmug, the host for my image gallery alexanderwild.com, has been down all morning.  The problem is apparently serious and resolution may take a while. I apologize for the inconvenience.  If there was a particular image you were looking for this morning and now you can't get to it, email me. *update 12:15pm; we're online again!

A Hitchens poll

Time Magazine is running a poll to determine who are the most influential people in the world — like an online poll is the best way to do that — and one of them is Christopher Hitchens, who currently has 11989 votes saying he's influential, and 570 saying he's not. Join the mob, and let's make it even more of a landslide!

The giant panda: a morphological study of evolutionary mechanisms

By way of GrrlScientist, I notice that Fieldiana (the journal of the Field Museum is now freely available online. This means that DD Davis’ classic study "The giant panda: a morphological study of evolutionary mechanisms" of 1964 can now be enjoyed by one and all. Over three hundred pages, detailing everything you’d want to know about giant panda morphology.

Human-Neanderthal hybridization (here we go again ...)

AP is reporting that a "skull found in a cave in Romania includes features of both modern humans and Neanderthals, possibly suggesting that the two may have interbred thousands of years ago." A paper to appear in Tuesday's PNAS (and not online yet) will argue that the ~40,000 year old skull raises "important questions about the evolutionary history of modern humans,"

They hypocrisy of “don't ask, don't tell”

It will be interesting to see if anyone squawks about this revelation: Army Chaplain Lt. Col. William McCoy seems to have a wild and frolicsome sex life, while writing pious little books promoting Christianity. There's absolutely nothing suggesting male homosexuality in his online personal history, but isn't the occasional menage a trois or voyeurism session as sinful to an evangelical Christian?

Friday Grey Matters: Alex in Action

Busy week this week, I submitted a paper day before yesterday which is the first time I did it myself. The online submission system is really convienent! Anyway, for Friday Grey Matters, check out this amazing video of Alex the grey parrot in action with Dr. Irene Pepperberg. Its the third video down, since I can't embed the video unfortunately.

Law for Bloggers

I spent some time today chatting with Sam Bayard of the Citizen Media Law Project. It occurred to me that some of you who are newer to blogging might not know they have an invaluable database of articles on legal issues related to online publishing - a good resource to bookmark! (See, for example, "legal protections for anonymous speech".)

Encephalon 45/46

Encephalon 46 is now online at The Neurocritic's blog, and contains lots of fantastic neuroscience blogging, including posts on Senator Ted Kennedy's brain tumour, phantom supernumery limbs, and anti-drug vaccines. The previous edition, at PodBlack Blog, also contains plenty of good reading material; I didn't link to it at the time as I was still busy with my exam revision.

Thomson Scientific Nobel Predictions

Someone yesterday asked whether there were online odds for the upcoming Nobels? Well Thomson Scientific (producers of ISI and other citation indices) have their own predictions and a poll too (although they only give 3 choices???) Medicine & Physiology predictions (by Thomson Sci): For more speculation on the Nobels (including my pics and the pics of many others, click here).

Genetics and Health Interview

Hsien at Genetics and Health decided it would be interesting to interview some idiot and post the answers online. The idiot tried his best to answer the five questions (no, not those five questions) posed to him, and you can either berate him for his answers at Genetics and Health or right here in the comments section.

Carnivalia, and an open thread

Encephalon 13 Carnival of Education #98 In other news, Atheism Online is back in version 2.0. All heathens should report for registration at once. I'll mention again that there's a new Tangled Bank at Salto Sobrious. Any volunteers for future hosting duties? We have slots open starting in April—drop me a note if you're interested.

Atheists Can Not Legally Hold Public Office

There are six or seven states where you must believe in god (well, swear on the bible that you believe in god) in order to hold public office. I may have to boycott the Science Online 2010 conference, because it is in one of those states! Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Numerical Calculation in Open Office

I created another screen cast showing how to get started with a numerical calculation for one of my classes. In this case, the students are attempting to model the motion of an object falling with air resistance. The following example doesn't show the steps including the air resistance, but maybe it is enough to get someone started. Record your screencast online

Chris Anderson, Media Transparency, and the Beauty and Danger of Dumb Questions

Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail, recently raised some juicy issues about bringing a Media 2.0 sort of transparency to a Media 1.0 (okay, Media 1.4) "traditional" magazine like Wired. His proposals address questions that I, as a writer mainly in 1.0 venues like print magazines and books, have been mulling over in a back-of-the-head sort of way. (My long recent silence on this blog, for instance, while due mainly to being far too busy, rose also from my ambivalence about what makes a worthwhile blog post (more on that some other time) and a slight unease with…

Sacred Imagery on Dish Rags

[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, Gotland, religion, feminism, ; arkeologi, Gotland, religion, feminism.] Some time ago I received a gift from my aunt, bought at the County Museum of Gotland, a limestone island in the Baltic with an extremely rich archaeological record. The gift was a sponge-fabric dish rag, and I found its decoration slightly astonishing. In the 5th through the 12th centuries, Gotland was home to a unique tradition of commemorative picture stones, comparable only to those of Pictland, with which they do not appear to have had any actual connection. The early…

Language, framing and women in computer science

As I ease myself back into the swing of things after a couple of weeks off and start to pay attention again to what's going on in the online world, I thought I'd bring this post to the attention of as wide an audience as possible. It's The importance of language and framing, part eleventy-thousand by Amy Csizmar Dalal on her blog, This is what a computer scientist looks like. Dalal draws a link between the decline in female CS enrollments since they peaked in the 1980s and the way we talk about entering the field in very competitive language rather than emphasizing mentoring or collaboration…

Role Models in Science & Engineering: Jawed Karim -- Computer Science Innovator

--Co-creator and co-founder of YouTube with partners Chad Hurley and Steven Chen --One of the first computer engineers behind the success of PayPal, the online payment service --Recently started his own internet service, Youniversity Ventures Even as a teen, Jawed Karim displayed considerable talent and genius in the realm of computer science. Among his early feats: As a high school senior, while creating a website for a research lab at the University of Minnesota, he came up with a complex computational process to help the lab map the atomic structure of a crucial protein -- a process that…

Metagenomics, biomes, and dirt: separating good data from bad

The simple fact is this: some DNA sequences are more believable than others. The problem is, that many students and researchers never see any of the metrics that we use for evaluating whether a sequence is "good" and whether a sequence is "bad." All they see are the base calls and sequences: ATAGATAGACGAGTAG, without any supporting information to help them evaluate if the sequence is correct. If DNA sequencing and personalized genetic testing are to become commonplace, the practice of ignoring data quality is (in my opinion) simply unacceptable. So, for awhile anyway, I'm making a…

The making of an embryo: information and mechanics

Is the general audience "black board" talk at KITP today, giving an overview of the quantitative approches to morphogenesis program currently unverway. Symmetry breaking and mechanics. The Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics runs parallel programs and currently there is a biophysics program New Quantitative Approaches to Morphogenesis concurrent with the astrophysics program on A Universe of Black Holes During each multi-week program there is a black board lunch talk, for all members of KITP, giving an overview of the theme of the program or some key aspect of it. The talk is intended to…

Brilliant!

Via EpiMonday comes an interview with epidemiologist and physican Larry Brilliant, who was tapped to be the head of Google.org ("the philanthropic arm of Google") earlier this year: If Larry Brilliant's life were a film, critics would pan the plot as implausible. Trained as a physician, he was studying in an Indian monastery in 1973 when a guru told him to join the UN smallpox vaccination effort. Brilliant helped eradicate the disease from India and eventually the planet. He returned to the US and founded a charity organization, Seva, that has saved millions of people in developing…

Maybe baby Jesus is playing with Dad's branding iron again

This is Ali, a six month old baby in Southern Russia. It's a miracle! Every Monday and Thursday, fresh quotations from the Quran 'magically' appear on his legs, belly, or arms when he's home alone with his mommy and daddy, and then the pilgrims show up in the thousands to give the happy family lots and lots of attention. I simply can't imagine how red marks might appear on the delicate skin of a young baby while under the care of doting, attentive parents, or why anyone might cheat and fake a miracle…can you? The only possible explanation is that the omnipotent, omniscient master of the…

Harvard considers Free Access

In today's NYTimes: At Harvard, a Proposal to Publish Free on Web: Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs. Although the outcome of Tuesday's vote would apply only to Harvard's arts and sciences faculty, the impact, given the university's prestige, could be significant for the open-access movement, which seeks to make scientific and scholarly research available to as many people as possible at…

KITP: rapidly rotating stars

stars do turn, sometimes fast enough to be noticeably flattened this may have consequences Like So there are two issues related to stellar rotation contemplated this morning: Altair now, way flatter than that... self-enrichment - back to the good old O/Na anti-correlation evidence for H burning at high T trick is not so much to burn the H, but to get the ashes out... can do that either with AGB stars, yes, it is the dreaded "third dredge up", or just boring old hot bottom burning... ok, don't ever google that. AGB dredge up (from Eskridge's online lecture notes at MNSU) anyway, to get…

Two New Issues Of Fornvännen On-line

Fornvännen's web site has become subsumed into the general document repository of the National Heritage Board. I am not happy about this. But still, we can now offer two new issues on-line for free! So much good research here! Autumn 2012 (no 3): Ludvig Papmehl-Dufay on the first farmers of Öland. Martin Hansson on a Medieval execution cemetery in Småland. Michaela Helmbrecht on a 10th century sword chape depicting Wayland the Smith from Uppåkra in Scania. Hanna Källström on the Medieval local cult of Saint Holmger in Uppland. Tobias Bondesson & Lennart Bondeson on a Migration Period…

Swedish Historical Bibliography Mysteriously Threatened

Here's a case of odd priorities. The Royal Library in Stockholm keeps a copy of everything that is printed in Sweden (and Swedish), and also has a lot of people tending LIBRIS, the national bibliographic database. Recently, the folks who keep track of scholarly publications in historical research (through the Swedish Historical Bibliography project) completed the digitisation of a huge printed bibliography for their field, which means that LIBRIS now contains references to almost every piece of historical research that has ever been published in this country. Now, how is the Royal Library…

Brown Bottle

Broon bottles it says the BBC. Well no, they put it more politely: "Gordon Brown has said he will not call a general election this autumn". Jolly good, all the politico-types can go back to sleep again. Of course, the true Brown Bottle (scroll to the bottom) was in Viz, but it proven hard to find a picture online. From the point of view of the smaller parties (Green :-) this is a relief and will make my personal autumn a bit easier. But where does it leave Brown? Looking fairly stupid says Beeb blogoid, which is what I thought. As far as I can tell Broon only talked about the election to…

My Bronze Age Book Is Out

Dear Reader, it is with great pleasure that I announce the PDF publication of my fifth monograph,* In the Landscape and Between Worlds. The paper version will appear in April or May. Here's the back-cover blurb. Bronze Age settlements and burials in the Swedish provinces around Lakes Mälaren and Hjälmaren yield few bronze objects and fewer of the era's fine stone battle axes. Instead, these things were found by people working on wetland reclamation and stream dredging for about a century up to the Second World War. Then the finds stopped because of changed agricultural practices. The objects…

Another Radio Appearance

I just got a call from Jim Babka inviting me on his show for a second time this Sunday. The subject will be the 14th amendment and whether or not it intended to incorporate the bill of rights as enforcable against the states. My opponent will be none other than Herb Titus, former dean of the Regent University Law School. Mr. Titus is a good friend of Jim Babka's as well as of Perry Willis, who comments here from time to time. He did the legal work on Perry's court case seeking to overturn the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act, on which he and I would agree. It should be a very…

Deranged creationists: here are your instructions

Oh, that little scamp, Billy Dembski. He's all upset about his shabby treatment at Baylor, and he's displacing his anger into a defense of Robert Marks. President John Lilley of Baylor appears to have made up his mind that Prof. Robert Marks's Evolutionary Informatics Lab is to have no place at Baylor. There is only one court of appeal now, the Baylor Board of Regents, who can reverse Lilley's decision and even remove Lilley as president. Here is the list of board members. I encourage readers of UD to contact them (respectfully) and share their concerns about this gross violation of academic…

Literature Check

In one of the weirdest attempts to pretend that creationism is a real science, a student at Harvard Law School wrote a favorable review in the Harvard Law Review of a book about Intelligent Design. You'd think that this would be so irrelevant that it would vanish off the cultural radar in a flash. But it has ballooned into something of a blogospheric hurricane, mainly because the National Review Online wants to pretend that criticism of the review is an Inquisition-style persecution. It's a cute way to distract attention from the basic issue of whether creationism in any of its manifestations…

The Sad, Unfortunate Argument for Geoengineering Research

My latest Science Progress column just went online--I look at the issue of geoengineering, and reluctantly conclude that given our current predicament, the case for at least studying possible options makes a lot of sense. Research isn't the same as implementation, but it could give us a fallback. It could give us choices. To wit: Sure, research might make ultimate meddling more likely. But then, isn't the climate situation forcing our hand anyway? What if a rogue government, or a crazy billionaire, decides to unilaterally execute one of these geoengineering proposals regardless of what the…

1st Annual CRASH THE INTERSECTION Contest

Well, I showed up here at The Intersection, and boy, the place needed some cleaning up...Chris's bad habits, leaving unwashed dishes in the sink, mountains of empty Miller Lite bottles everywhere, and most troubling...we have no proper Scibling banner. So after some sidebar housekeeping and other small-scale fixing up of things, it was time to address that major faux pas. As a result, Chris and I are now ready to announce: The 1st Annual CRASH THE INTERSECTION Contest Design an "Intersection" banner and have your art displayed atop our blog for at least one year where the world can be…

An unstable contest of minds

I was reading last week's New Yorker, and this passage by Adam Gopnik - part of a long piece about professional magicians - caught my attention. I really agree with this: Whatever the context, the empathetic interchange between minds is satisfying only when it is "dynamic," unfinished, unresolved. Friendships, flirtations, even love affairs depend, like magic tricks, on a constant exchange of incomplete but tantalizing information. We are always reducing the claim or raising the proof. The magician teaches us that romance lies in an unstable contest of minds that leaves us knowing it's a…

Blogging Pro Bono

Photo source. The blogosphere can be a strange world for writers, offering vistas as broad ranging and fickle as human nature itself. Bloggers relying on pageviews for sustenance, even those who do not, face the challenge of attracting as many readers as possible, sometimes at the cost of becoming an uncivil "woo meister," provocateur or even worse, a demagogue. From my first post at "Dean's Corner," I wanted to avoid these potential traps and to simply share what I love about science, sometimes bringing to light mistruths or misrepresentations - at least in my opinion. So, I blog for…

Must-see TV? Frontline takes on anti-vaxers

This is an excellent review of a program that will be on tonight: Tonight on Frontline, "The Vaccine War" presents both sides of the controversy over whether young children should be vaccinated for diseases such as measles and polio, and in a rare display of TV-news common sense and independence, one side is shown to be — sorry — wrong. Frontline's documentary will, I hope, leave any sensible viewer feeling that you'd have be deluded or selfish not to have your kids vaccinated. Now I'm going to have to tune in just for the unbelievable spectacle of a television show taking a skeptical,…

Blogs and the Future of Science

This was one of my first posts about blogging, and THE first about the impact of blogging technolgoy on science. A lot of time has passed since then. There are several science-related carnivals now, not just Tangled Bank. There are SEED scienceblogs. It is fun to look back at my first raw thoughts and see if, or how much, I was right or wrong on specifics. Under the fold.... I have done meta-blogging, i.e., written about the phenomenon of blogs, very, very little. Actually, I found only five posts in the archives that are specifically about blogging. The first three are very early and are…

Journalism at ScienceOnline2010

The year that just ended, 2009, was a year that saw huge changes in the world of media and the world of journalism. Science journalism has also been greatly affected, with many media outlets firing their science journalists first, then firing all the others afterwards. Much virtual ink has been spilled on the topics of "death of newspapers" and "bloggers vs. journalists is over" and "future of journalism", etc. If you checked out everyone who's registered for the ScienceOnline2010 conference, or followed my posts introducing everyone, you have probably noticed that this, fourth meeting is…

Journalism at ScienceOnline2010

The year that just ended, 2009, was a year that saw huge changes in the world of media and the world of journalism. Science journalism has also been greatly affected, with many media outlets firing their science journalists first, then firing all the others afterwards. Much virtual ink has been spilled on the topics of "death of newspapers" and "bloggers vs. journalists is over" and "future of journalism", etc. If you checked out everyone who's registered for the ScienceOnline2010 conference, or followed my posts introducing everyone, you have probably noticed that this, fourth meeting is…

10 Or 20 Things To Do After Installing Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr

MOST CURRENT INFORMATION WILL BE FOUND HERE: Things To Do After Installing Ubuntu 16.04 LTS NEW: Very first look at Ubuntu Linux 15.04 Vivid Vervet Beta Mate Flavor See: Books on Linux and Ubuntu NOTE: This may not be the blog post you are looking for. If you have installed Ubuntu 14.10 and want to tweak that, GO HERE. Continue on for 14.04. Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr has just been released, and I’m sure you are about to install it. I’ve put together a few ideas for what to do after installation in order to make it work better for you. You’ll find that below. First, a bit of ranty…

Stephanie Coontz On Marriage

You probably know that I am quite interested in the history, current state, evolution and future of the institution of marriage, mainly because it is an important indicator of societal attitudes towards sex and towards gender-relations, which is the key to understanding political ideology. Between May 29, 2005 and February 23, 2006 I frequently mentioned Stephanie Coontz and particularly her latest book - Marriage, A History, e.g., in New History Of Marriage, Stephanie Coontz On Marriage, Op-Ed on the 'End of Marriage', Don't Know Much About History.... and What 'traditional' marriage?.…

Stephanie Coontz On Marriage

You probably know that I am quite interested in the history, current state, evolution and future of the institution of marriage, mainly because it is an important indicator of societal attitudes towards sex and towards gender-relations, which is the key to understanding political ideology. Between May 29, 2005 and February 23, 2006 I frequently mentioned Stephanie Coontz and particularly her latest book - Marriage, A History, e.g., in New History Of Marriage, Stephanie Coontz On Marriage, Op-Ed on the 'End of Marriage', Don't Know Much About History.... and What 'traditional' marriage?.…

World Series of Poker

The World Series of Poker is going on right now at Binion's Horseshoe in Las Vegas. Most people are familiar with it from the replays on ESPN, watching Chris Moneymaker win last year. But if you're not a poker player, you probably don't realize that the event that is televised is only the last of 33 separate tournaments played over about 5 weeks. The events run the gamut of different games played, buy-in amounts, and limits, leading up to the Big One, the championship event, which is a $10,000 entry No Limit Holdem tournament. This year they are expecting something on the order of 1400-1600…

Occupational Safety and Health Classic Movie Festival

By David Michaels Lifelines Online, the safety and health publication of the Laborersâ Health and Safety Fund of North America, is publicizing some important videos â dealing with the history of occupational health and safety in the U.S., industrial hygiene pioneer Alice Hamilton, and the lung disease silicosis â that are now available for free online viewing. Iâve added recommendations of videos on a pesticide that sterilizes workers and on asbestos that are also well worth viewing and sharing, particularly if youâre an educator or leader of a group that deals with occupational health. Stop…

What Dutch librarians now know about the Steacie Library

Yesterday York University Libraries was visited by a delegation of 39 academic librarians, mostly from The Netherlands but also a couple from Belgium. They are on a tour of many of the academic libraries of Southern Ontario, hoping to learn and share a bit about how libraries in different countries are handling the challenges of the future. You can follow their progress on Twitter using the hashtag #nvbcan. As I said, they were here yesterday. During the morning they got some presentations about the York Libraries in general and a tour of the Scott Library and its new Learning Commons. In…

Best Science Books: Electronic Frontier Foundation

Every year for the last bunch of years I’ve been linking to and posting all the “year’s best sciencey books” lists that I can find around the web in various media outlets. From the beginning it’s been a pretty popular service so I’m happy to continue it. The previous posts for all the 2013 lists are here. This time it's EFF's Reading List: Books of 2013. The Internet Police: How Crime Went Online, and the Cops Followed by Nate Anderson On Internet Freedom by Marvin Ammori Beyond WikiLeaks: Implications for the Future of Communications, Journalism and Society edited by Benedetta Brevini,…

Brain & Behavior and Technology Weekly Channel Highlights

In this post: the large version of the Brain & Behavior and Technology channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week. Technology. From Flickr, by mugley Brain & Behavior. From Flickr, by woodleywonderworks Reader comments of the week: In Lunch with Heather Perry, Neurophilosophy interviews a woman who underwent a voluntary trepanation—that is, she had a hole drilled in her head. Heather cites one of her reasons for undergoing the procedure as wanting "more mental energy and clarity." Reader Ian isn't exactly compelled by that: I think people need…