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BloggingHeadTV on Framing Science

To be honest, I hadn't seen the online program Bloggingheads.tv before. But today they offer a pretty substantive discussion of our Framing Science thesis. Apparently the host agrees with us. His co-host misunderstands our goals for communication and the research on framing and media influence. But that's okay. It's clearly meant to be a point/counter-point. Kind of a Siskel and Ebert of blog commentary. Pretty cool.

Saturday timewaster

I think this will go over well with rudeness here: bluntcard.com. One could easily get sucked into long reveries here, contemplating exactly who you would send that card to. Not me, though. I'm off to do a little exercise, then I'm off the internet for a while to get some work done. I'm going to come back online to a lot of rudeness sent my way, aren't I?

Hooray for hyenas!

There are some new residents at the Bronx Zoo: spotted hyenas! I had never seen a live spotted hyena before, and I was quite surprised to find them in what had previously been the cheetah enclosure near the giraffe house. For more on spotted hyenas, see Sci's excellent post on hyena mating or my short essay on the "predatory intelligence" of hyenas in the online journal Antennae (p. 23-25).

LOLdenialists

I think LOLdenialist macros deserve their own thread. You can make your own with this convenient online tool. You can't post images in comments, so email them to me at deltoidblog AT gmail.com. It doesn't have to be AGW denial -- Lancet/Iraq, HIV/AIDS, evolution, DDT resistance are all worthy of a LOLdenialist macro. (Jennifer Ouellette of Cocktail Party Physics came up with LOLdenialists.)

The Dangers of Nanotech

In September Wired UK published my feature on the health risks of nanotechnology. The article is now online. Nanotechnology's commercial growth has been accompanied by fears that it could damage human health and the environment. This in turn is stoking pressure on government and regulators to limit -- even ban -- a technology whose promise includes cleaner fuels, improved water filtration, better medicines, faster electronics and healthier foods.

The "magnificent P-Zed"?

Aww, I'm flattered; Richard Dawkins read aloud part of my Courtier's Reply in his recent debate with Alister McGrath. You can listen to it online—I think I'm going to have to have Dawkins read all of my posts aloud, since he makes them sound so much better. If you want to listen to just the section where he reads my article, here's a 2.1 mp3 file.

The Open Laboratory now available!

Bora and Reed both put in a Herculean effort in getting the 2nd edition of The Open Laboratory ready in time for the Science Blogging Conference this weekend, but the book is finished and now up for sale at lulu.com! The book will also be showing up in stores and on major online bookstores in the near future, and I'd definitely recommend picking up a copy.

Another Video Analysis Tutorial

I made this screen cast for my algebra-based lab. Maybe you will find it useful also. This is a tutorial using Tracker Video Analysis (an awesome free program as I have said many times). In this tutorial I analyze a moving cart that shoots a ball up and lands back in the moving cart (called a Howitzer cart). The video is available at the LivePhoto Physics site. Screencasts and videos online

Biology and Computer Science: Sister sciences

Its time once again for my yearly forced vacation. So I have some time to read/respond to some great emails from readers! Dear ERV-- I am just a random reader of your blog and several other science blogs. I'm sorry to bother you with this, but your contact me page was written in lolcat so I figured you couldn't be too bad, right? :) Feel free to pose this to your readers, forward it, or garbage it- I'm sure your busy but really I'm just kinda lost right now... So, brief about me..I'm in my late 20s and having a "mid-20s crisis" a few years too late. When I was a teenager right out of high…

Pepsi: Messy.

I'm late to the party: I was in Europe, and before that I was in Los Angeles, and before that Colorado, and I am time-shifted and sleep-deprived (hate it: Takes away energy, intellectual nimbleness -- yeah, I got some -- and any ability to multi-task). And that's enough with the lame excuses. Constant readers may have noticed by now that my Sciblings here at Sb are in a justified uproar about the inclusion of a new blog, Food Frontiers, sponsored -- that means "paid for" -- by Pepsi Co. Sb runs on advertising, but this paid space is not in the ad rails and banners, but in the main column.…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: A bio-photon here, a bio-photon there...whatever a bio-photon is

Let's try this again. Two days ago, I tried to get away from blogging about antivaccinationists. I even succeeded for one day. Unfortunately, that was all, because J.B. Handley and his crew of antivaccine loons cooked up a really big, really deceptive, and really desperate gambit that just couldn't go unremarked upon. Thus was I sucked back in again. Even worse, this all came hot on the heels of a very sad time in the lives of my wife and myself. I needed something to lift my spirits. And nothing lifts one's spirits quite like fine, grade-A woo. Or perhaps I need my bio-photons analyzed with…

Back from Boston

Still recovering. Flights were smooth. I finally finished Jennifer Rohn's book on the airplane. I hated my Chapel Hill neighbors, lounging at the pool in 78F, as I was leaving for the cold, snowy Boston. But now I'm back. The first night, a bunch of us went to the Science Cafe and discussed the possibility of intelligent life in the Universe and methods to find them if they are out there. And had some dinner as well... On Monday, we gathered at WGBH station, in a nice, modern, green building, and about 20 of us discussed the PRI/BBC/NOVA/SigmaXi/WGBH/World project: how to build an online…

New and Exciting in PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine

A Gene Wiki for Community Annotation of Gene Function: Gene portals (e.g., Entrez Gene [1] and Ensembl [2]) and model organism databases (e.g., Mouse Genome Database [3], Rat Genome Database [4], FlyBase [5]) are popular and useful tools for researching gene annotation and enforcing data standards. These databases provide a large volume and diversity of information on each gene, including protein and transcript sequences, genome location, genomic structure, aliases, links to literature, and gene function. These sites are considered to be the definitive sources for these types of gene…

Is It Plagiarism? I Think So...

You may have noticed a site called "New York Articles" (http://nyarticles.com/) which "aggregates" content from a bunch of different blogs, including this one as well as a number of other scienceblogs.com blogs. It copies and pastes everything that is in the RSS feed, i.e., everything that is above the fold. As you know, I only occasionally place stuff under the fold, and some people never do. Sure, it does provide a link at the bottom, so in that way, it is a tiny little bit better than some sites that don't (you may recall this case - see Part I and Part II). But how much better? What…

What The...? Hey Death, That Was My Friend

I'm angry and confused. Death has never hit this close to home with me before. Anders was one of my best friends, a frequent guest at my table. I knew him for over 20 years. And now he's dead at 45, apparently of a heart attack. I'm stunned and full of disbelief. By profession an engineer and a programmer, Anders was also a prodigious traveller, a perennial student, an avid reader and a music lover. "Heart attack at 45" conjures the image of some hard-partying coke fiend. But Anders lead a quiet, even prim, bachelor's life and liked to play badminton. I knew this guy from my mid teens on! We…

Uncertain Dots, Academic Blogs

Last week, a comment I made on Twitter about the annoyance of doing merit evaluation paperwork led to some back-and-forth with Rhett Allain and the National Society of Black Physicists Twitter account about whether blogs can or should count toward academic evaluation. This seemed like a good topic for another video hangout with me and Rhett, which we did yesterday. Unfortunately, there were some technical issues with the hangout, which delayed the start and didn't allow live Q&A, but we did get video: (The camera appears to be on just me for most of this, so it's largely a hangout…

Humor Matters

What with one thing and another, I forgot to tag anything for the links dump yesterday, which means no links dump this morning. But that's all right, because Fred Clark's post about humorless prigs deserves a more prominent link. The proximate cause is yet another story about a crazy religious group working themselves into a tizzy over what turns out to be an online parody. This by itself is unremarkable-- as Fred says, "So in other words, it's a weekday." What's notable about the post is the bit that comes next, though: We've previously discussed how an addiction to self-righteous…

What I'm Planning to Nominate for the Hugos

We are now one week out from the deadline for Hugo Nominations. I'm eligible to nominate this year, and while a couple of past requests for recommendations have failed to generate anything, I thought I'd throw up a preliminary look at my ballot in hopes of bringing in a few recommendations: Best Novel Anathem by Neal Stephenson. I don't like his take on Many-Worlds, but it's a terrific book all the same. Sly Mongoose by Tobias Buckell. A fantastic setting, a great fast-moving plot, and some nice revelations about the universe. Pirate Sun by Karl Schroeder. Cut-and-paste the comments from the…

Alice gets back into blogging by sharing a freaky video of a tug capsizing in Skookumchuck Narrows

I'm back. In person, and online. And not all that thrilled about it, but I'll cope. ;-) I'll regale you with updates on our fab trip out west, and on how my fall is shaking out, including teaching and research plans, but I first have to finish reading a dissertation that is being defended tomorrow, and writing an activity report, also due tomorrow. Offlinelessness has its price, but at this point I still think it has been worth it. In the interim, let me share with you a video of a tug accident that happened in the Skookumchuck Narrows near my parents' cabin. The Skookumchuck (Chinook…

Psychic Detectives and the Chandra Levy Case

The Washington Post has been running a 12 part series on the now seven year old Chandra Levy murder case. As one article in the series describes, rather sadly, the DC police department wasted time and resources with predictions from self-described psychics. Tips were pouring in to the D.C. police department from all over the world at a furious pace, each one stranger than the last. Hundreds of psychics and oddballs were phoning in with their hunches, their visions and their sightings. Some of the tips were plausible. Others were not. All took time away from the case. Police were frustrated.…

Disowning pain with binoculars

My second article for the Scientific American Mind Matters website is online now. This one is about the recent study which demonstrated that distorting the body image alters pain perception - specifically, it was found that using inverted binoculars to make the hand look smaller than it actually was led to a reduction in the pain and swelling induced by movement in patients with chronic pain.  It is not clear why this happens, but the findings obviously have major implications for pain management. One explanation put forward by the authors is that this simple manipulation caused the subjects…

Wine Spectator gives award to non-existent restaurant

from the NY Times: Sour Grapes The news that Wine Spectator magazine was scammed into giving an Award of Excellence to a non-existent restaurant has been greeted with guffaws by schadenfreude fans and with fury by the magazine's editor. But longtime readers of the Dining section might have seen this coming. Five years ago Amanda Hesser wrote that the magazine granted the award, the lowest of three levels of recognition by the magazine, without actually inspecting the restaurants involved. Some of the reader comments at the Times site, however, note a more complex story: When I first read…

Gizmodo Giving Bloggers a Bad Name at CES 07

CES, or the Consumer Electronics Show, is a trade show held in Las Vegas where new products are announced and demonstrated to the press. This year's CES just ended January 10th, and it looks like there was a small scandal that occurred. Gizmodo, a popular tech/gadget blog owned by Gawker media, pulled a prank which has resulted in the prankster being banned from attending CES in the future. In a nutshell, they brought some devices called TV Be Gone to the shows and proceeded to randomly shut down screens during presentations and press demonstrations. This resulted in a lot of embarrassed…

A new heterodont pterosaur

The skull of Raeticodactylus filisurensis. From Stecher 2008. On April first I wrote about heterdonty in lizards, dinosaurs, and crocodylians, but it was no April Fool's Day joke; mammals aren't the only animals that have differently-shaped teeth throughout their jaws. I should have waited just a little bit longer to write the post, though, because a new genus of Upper Triassic pterosaur from Switzerland named Raeticodactylus filisurensis has just been announced in the Swiss Journal of Geosciences. Raeticodactylus is certainly a strange creature. It has heterodont teeth, a crest, and shows…

Getting to the Country with Fresh Air Fund

At my house today it was 82 and humid. It is hot, but there's a breeze, and shade from the trees. The air is heavy and moist, but rich and green and earthy as well, and my house stays cool downstairs. In New York City today, the temperature was above 90, and I can still smell, from my childhood in other cities, that shimmering hot urban mix of garbage, asphalt and pollution. Don't get me wrong - I love cities. But hot town, summer in the city is not always when urban life's virtues shine. I was an urban kid for part of my childhood, which is why I remember so strongly and passionately…

Notes Toward "A Brief History of Timekeeping": Kooks and Sticks

Barring a major disaster, I am scheduled to teach one of our Scholars Research Seminar classes next winter. I've been kicking the idea for this around for a while, with the semi-clever title "A Brief History of Timekeeping." The idea is to talk about the different technologies people have used to mark the passage of time, from Stonehenge down to modern atomic clocks. There's a lot of good science in there, from astronomy (sundials and the like) to basic mechanics (pendulums and so on) to quantum physics (atomic clocks) and even relativity. And there's plenty of room for side trips into other…

Tri, Dva, Odin, Zashiganiye!: A Review of 'Live From Cape Canaveral'

The following is a guest post by Tim Marzullo, Graduate Student in Engineering/Neuroscience at the University of Michigan. "Tri, Dva, Odin, Zashiganiye!" (Three, Two, One, Ignition!) A review of "Live from Cape Canaveral" by Jay Barbree "Live from Cape Canaveral" by Jay Barbree serves as a well-written introduction to the last 50 years of human spaceflight. Covering the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and space shuttle missions in 307 pages makes for very fast, pleasant light reading, and the book also serves as a memoir of sorts for Jay Barbree, who was a correspondent for NBC from the first…

Ask a toxicologist: Should I take bioidentical progesterone?

Question from LindaW: What's up with bioidentical hormones? Is it okay to take them? Bioidentical progesterone is a joke. Don't even think about buying it. Then, consult your doctor with your health concerns. Bioidentical progesterone is sold on numerous web pages after having been popularized by John Lee and now Joseph Mercola (and by findings that hormone replacement therapy isn't safe for everyone). It's unscientific and dangerous. Reason 1 As stated on some web site: 'Bioidentical hormone therapy has all of the good effects of HRT with none of the severe side-effects that have caused so…

The shopping experts

Politics aside, Mrs. R. and I are real Americans in one important way. We like to shop. Not shop as in "buy." We couldn't afford that. Shop as in entertainment. We like each other's company (we've had many years to get used to it), so when we go to a new place we wander in and out of shops, looking at things. Maybe not the most uplifting of pursuits -- better we should be going to museums, I suppose -- but we like it. So a new study by The Nielsen Company (TV ratings) piqued our interest. Essentially it wanted to know what went into brand loyalty and why that loyalty seemed to be more…

"Science in Fiction" Kavli Science Video Contest!

Now entering its third year, the Kavli Science Video contest, an international middle and high school student competition that is held as part of the USA Science & Engineering Festival, has announced "Science in Fiction" as the contest theme! The contest, sponsored by the Kavli Foundation, is designed to challenge students to investigate science through video storytelling while promoting participation in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) subjects. The new theme, "Science in Fiction" was inspired by the mission of the Science & Entertainment Exchange, a program of the…

Born to do Science using Social Media to help promote the Festival!

Now THIS is what I was writing about in my last post about how YOU can help the science festival. Monty Harper tweets about the festival (@montyharper), submitted a jingle into the festival contest, writes about the festival on his blog born to do science, publisizes the festival by sporting one of our t-shirts AND he is even going to be performing at the Festival in the Fall!! Thanks MONTY for getting the word out about the USA Science and Engineering Festival in so many ways! From his blog Born to do Science USA Science and Engineering Festival Theme Song I'm really excited about this,…

Femicide

While we are discussing femiphobia, mysoginy and the "new male anger", you may want to take a break from hundreds and hundreds of comments on all the threads on all the posts (see the links within links on the last link!), and instead read an old, old science fiction story on the topic (is there any ethical dilemma that SF has not covered decades ago?). Gmoke, in a comment on this post on Orcinus links to The Screwfly Solution by Raccoona Sheldon (aka Jane Sheldon aka James Tiptree Jr). The whole story is online. Gmoke also cites Wikipedia on the story: "The story begins with an exchange of…

Zebrafish Rules!

I hope PZ will comment on this study: A humble aquarium fish may be the key to finding therapies capable of preventing the structural birth defects that account for one out of three infant deaths in the United States today.That is one of the implications of a new study published online August 8 in the journal Cell Metabolism. The paper describes a number of striking parallels between a rare but fatal human birth defect called Menkes disease and a lethal mutation in a small tropical fish called the zebrafish that has become an important animal model for studying early development. ------------…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Fish Can Determine Their Social Rank By Observation Alone, Study Finds: A male fish can size up potential rivals, and even rank them from strongest to weakest, simply by watching how they perform in territorial fights with other males, according to a new study by Stanford University scientists. The researchers say their discovery provides the first direct evidence that fish, like people, can use logical reasoning to figure out their place in the pecking order. Genetic Evaluations Help Breed Better Bossies: Breeding dairy cattle is an inexact science, so many gene-linked traits must be…

Adam Bly Speaks

tags: Food Frontiers, Astroturf blog, influence peddling, PepsiCo,pepsi, scienceblogs Subject: Food Frontiers Dear ScienceBloggers, I will be posting this on 3.14 in a few minutes: We have removed Food Frontiers from SB. We apologize for what some of you viewed as a violation of your immense trust in ScienceBlogs. Although we (and many of you) believe strongly in the need to engage industry in pursuit of science-driven social change, this was clearly not the right way. How do we empower top scientists working in industry to lead science-minded positive change within their organizations?…

Apply MY Self

'Tis the season... ...to write dozens of recommendation letters. And, may I say, to the graduate program administrators around the country; the commercial on-line application services universally suck. Having to enter and re-enter the same information about myself, as a recommender, on poorly designed piece of crap websites is a waste of my time and a source of enormous irritation. If this continues I will start boycotting electronic grad school application services and send good old fashioned paper letters directly to the departments. I expect someone will then have to scan them (into…

all the myriad planets

NASA's Kepler mission has now been looking for transiting exoplanets for almost two years, and while we wait for the release of the next set of data and identified candidate exoplanets, they produced a very striking summary of what they got so far. These are all 1235 exoplanet candidates from the first set of data releases! The image shows the planet candidates and their host stars to scale, with the relative stellar size also shown correctly to scale, and the stellar colour rendered accurately. This is a really really nice illustration of what Kepler has found to date. It should be noted…

liveblogging the high redshift universe postscriptum

meeting is over, what did we learn first: don't wear "city socks" in ski boots - first day out I forgot to switch to high wool socks and I have the most amazing line of blisters on my left calf... totally awesome skiing though good meeting also, I gather all the talks will be online soon, will post pointer when it does two further things that interest me, and my apologies to all the talks and topics I didn't mention... first, there is the issue of reionization - did it come early, starting at redshift 10-15, as some of us think it must, or did it come late with rapid reionization between…

Bushehr going online in october

Iranian news agency is reporting that the Bushehr nuclear power station is going online in October 2007 That is interesting. It means the reports earlier that the fuel was delivered quietly by the Russians was accurate and they must be loading the reactor starting right now, if they want to be running in 3-4 months. It also means that people who are paranoid about Busherh being used to breed weapons grade plutonium 239 from fuel grade low enriched uranium are going to get extra paranoid over the next 3-9 months. By november it would be dangerously late to "do" anything about Bushehr, and if…

Friday Fun: The Lie of Star Wars as Entertainment

John Scalzi is one of my guaranteed Friday Fun go-to guys. Always amusing, always entertaining and occasionally controversial and provocative. He's definitely in the controversial and provocative mode here in a 2006 blog post entitled The Lie of Star Wars as Entertainment. The post is scathingly funny, cruel and vicious and sarcastic and brilliant. And spot on. So let's not pretend that the Star Wars series is this great piece of entertainment. Instead, let's call it what it is: A monument to George Lucas pleasuring himself. Which, you know, is fine. I'm happy for Lucas; it's nice that he…

NOVA: Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial

tags: evolution, politics, education, Kitzmiller, Dover School District, intelligent design, Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, NOVA, streaming video Occasionally, very rarely in fact, I wish I had a television, and this is one of those days. I just received an ad from Kate Becker, regarding a new NOVA program, "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial" which will air 8 pm on Tuesday, November 13 on your local PBS station (you might have also noticed that they are advertizing this program on this site). This program documents the war over evolution that came to Dover, Pennsylvania…

Wikileaks

David Appell's recent post is excellent, so I'll steal most of it, a quote from Hillary Clinton in January: During his visit to China in November, President Obama held a town hall meeting with an online component to highlight the importance of the internet. In response to a question that was sent in over the internet, he defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows, the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens to hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages…

Links for 2011-04-21

How to be South Asian on American TV « North Philly Notes "Recently, a student presented on Outsourced, providing an overview of the TV show, clips, and some background information, including that Outsourced is the longest running show to date that has multiple South Asians as major characters.  With over two million South Asians (from India, Pakistani, and other countries abutting the subcontinent) in America, I wonder why the first popular show about South Asians on American TV is set in India.  Also, although the actors are North American or British, they must adopt Indian accents for…

Retro Gamer

I never was much of a game console nut. My video game crazes mostly played out on the PC. But I did play the Atari in the 70s, the C64 in the 80s and the NES and SNES in the early 90s, when I wrote for Nintendo mags and borrowed the hardware from my employers. The SNES was the last console I paid any attention to. 11-y-o Junior loves all kinds of video games, particularly on-line multiplayer ones like Roblox and Runescape. But he's also installed emulator software on the PC and played a lot of old games that originally ran on machines he's never actually seen. He's got a Wii which allows him…

Geek Dump

1. The new Sookie Stackhouse book came out a few weeks ago, 'Dead and Gone'. I didnt blag about it because it sucked donkey balls. The general consensus is that it reads like someone other than Charlaine Harris wrote it. Someone who hadnt read the first eight books very well... if at all. Im not mad, though, as long as she recovers. One clunker out of nine aint bad at all. Get it at the library, or wait till paperback if your collection must be complete. 2. Season 2 of 'True Blood' starts in eleven days. eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!! *giddy clapping* You can try to win Season 1 DVDs or…

The Slave Rebellion is Here!

Achenbach, A., Foitzik, S. 2009. FIRST EVIDENCE FOR SLAVE REBELLION: ENSLAVED ANT WORKERS SYSTEMATICALLY KILL THE BROOD OF THEIR SOCIAL PARASITE PROTOMOGNATHUS AMERICANUS .  Evolution, Online Early, doi: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.2009.00591.x Abstract: During the process of coevolution, social parasites have evolved sophisticated strategies to exploit the brood care behavior of their social hosts. Slave-making ant queens invade host colonies and kill or eject all adult host ants. Host workers, which eclose from the remaining brood, are tricked into caring for the parasite brood. Due to their high…

Wine Authorities wine guys on local NPR today (Obama pre-emption; postponed 'til tomorrow)

Salamanzar and the Grand Poobah Wine Swami (Seth Gross and Craig Heffley) of the nationally-recognized wine merchant and community resource, Wine Authorities, will be appearing today on the local NPR affiliate. Here is the official word from the boys themselves: Wow! This coming Monday, the 24th, we're going to be on the air with none other than Mr. Frank Stasio on WUNC/NPR's "The State of Things" radio show. This is possibly the highlight of our professional careers thus far! We love this show. So tune in online or on the radio this coming Monday (November 24th @ 12 noon) of Thanksgiving…

Of course the dog won

A while back, the Way of the Master (Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron) came out with a board game, Intelligent Design vs. Evolution. I imagine the Discovery Institute cringes in pain every time those two clowns associate themselves with their brand, which is good; but you know it has to be an awful, horrible, brain-damaging game, which is bad. I thought about picking up a copy just for the kitsch value, but just couldn't bring myself to pay them money for it (and now it seems to have vanished from their online store). But Chad bought it and played it against his dog (his wife was too smart to…

New Journal: Evolutionary Applications

A new journal, titled Evolutionary Applications, has just appeared and the 2008 contents will be available online for free. Evolution now permeates essentially all aspects of biology, and evolutionary concepts and methods are being applied to problems of considerable practical importance. For example, concepts in evolutionary biology guide research to reduce drug resistance of pathogens and parasites, to discover ways of ensuring the long term genetic health of endangered species and some crop foods, to improve the understanding of the ultimate causes of medical diseases, and to predict the…

My Guardian column and other news

THANKS to those of you who've been in touch asking why I haven't been blogging lately. Rest assured that I'm still very much alive and kicking - I put the blog on ice temporarily to work on several other projects, and will start updating it regularly in the near future. I've written something special to make up for my prolonged absence, and will post that sometime in the next few days. I may also have one or more big announcements. Meanwhile, you might like to read the articles I've written for The Guardian. I've been writing for their science blog on a roughly fortnightly basis since…