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Porn Is Probably Not the Best Way to Restore Science to Its Rightful Place

At the behest of Our Benevolent Seed Overlords, I recently discussed elitism and how to restore science to its rightful place. I think, though, porn is probably not the best way to do so (italics mine): ...the [NSF] employees in question weren't just logging onto their Facebook accounts or buying birthday gifts on Amazon.com. The report says they were watching, downloading and e-mailing porn, sometimes for significant portions of their workdays, and over periods of months or even years. In one particularly egregious case, the report says one NSF "senior official" was discovered to have spent…

Ethics in the Science Classroom

From NWABR: Would you like to integrate ethics into your science classroom, but aren't sure which topics to address or teaching methods to use? Do you feel that ethics is important to include in science education, but feel uncomfortable with your own lack of background knowledge? Have you observed how students' motivation to learn content increases when science is discussed within its social and ethical context? Come to the Ethics in the Science Classroom workshop and learn more! Who is this for? Secondary Science Teachers Program dates: July 16-20, 2007 (participants may arrive July 15…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

What Did Dinosaurs Hear?: What did dinosaurs hear? Probably a lot of low frequency sounds, like the heavy footsteps of another dinosaur, if University of Maryland professor Robert Dooling and his colleagues are right. What they likely couldn't hear were the high pitched sounds that birds make. Scientists Join Fight To Save Tasmanian Devil From Deadly Cancer: CSIRO scientists have joined the battle to save Australia's iconic Tasmanian devils from the deadly cancer currently devastating devil populations. Stray Penguins Probably Reached Northern Waters By Fishing Boat: Guy Demmert got quite a…

EGU

Its EGU time again. Monday was a bit of a blur (technically I got to my hotel on monday, about half past midnight. Travelling Air Austria is a lot more pleasant than RyanAir, though). Tuesday was better, partly because I gave up on the stupid "personal programme" stuff the site lets you build on-line and simply got one of the huge book-blocks of sessions. Morning: global dimming/brightening. More stuff pretty well confirming the old: that GD masked increasing GHG forcing up till 1980 ish; and we've seen "brightening" since then (e.g. Wild). nb the conf search engine is here. Ray Bradley…

Other People Need Your Help

Several items in the general category of charitable activity: Kate is running the Con or Bust auction again this year, with proceeds going to support people of color interested in attending SFF cons, principally Wiscon. Bidding is open through Saturday at 11:59pm ET, and items up for bid include many things that may be of interest to readers of this blog, including a certain book, plus a bunch of other stuff I will put below the fold. I got email from the Nobel Prize committee the other day. Well, OK, the webmaster for Nobelprize.org. They have an "Ask a Nobel laureate" feature going on…

You give pharma...a bad name - alleged intimidation of Avandia critic

Readers who are busting their butts doing basic and drug development research in pharmaceutical companies don't need this kind of alleged behavior from upper management - from Jeanne Whalen at the Wall Street Journal (online yesterday and in today's print edition) following up on a story first reported in the Journal on 24 May 2007: Over a period of several years, drug maker GlaxoSmithKline PLC was so concerned about a prominent physician's negative views of its diabetes drug that it engaged in a concerted effort to intimidate him and stifle his opinion, a report by the U.S. Senate Finance…

Sunday Function

Pick a two-digit number. Anything from 0 to 99 inclusive will work, because the single digit numbers can be considered to have a leading zero. Add the digits together. Subtract that from the original number. So if you started with 12, you add the digits to get 3, and subtract that from 12 to get 9 as your final answer. Ok well that's a bit mundane and boring, though it sounds like the setup to a magic trick. And so it is. We'll worry about the trick in a minute. First we'd like to write that algorithm as a function. First we'll have to figure out a way to extract the digits from the…

MSU has serious competition ... NOT!

Dembski pimps an interview with his new bestest buddy, the electrical and computer engineer, Robert Marks "director of the Baylor Evolutionary Informatics Lab" (which is comprised of Dembski, Marks and two students). The Isaac Newton of Information Theory says: I hope you catch from the interview the ambitiousness of the lab and how it promises to put people like Christoph Adami and Rob Pennock out of business (compare www.evolutionaryinformatics.org with devolab.cse.msu.edu). Let’s do that shall we? Let’s compare the two labs. Number of journal papers by the Baylor Evolutionary Informatics…

Fishing for Architeuthis, the giant squid

Lots of people have been emailing me with the news about this filmed sequence showing a giant squid snagged on a deep line. Did you know that the paper is freely available online (pdf)? It's very cool. The researchers were jigging for squid with a 1km long line, snagged one by a tentacle, and then watched for the next four hours as it struggled to get free. The squid's initial attack was captured on camera (figure 3a) and shows the two long tentacles characteristic of giant squid wrapped in a ball around the bait. The giant squid became snagged on the squid jig by the club of one of these…

The Grand Canyon is how old?

At this point, it's safe to say the National Park Service is stonewalling. There is a book called The Grand Canyon: A Different View, written from a young earth creationist perspective, which the NPS has approved for sale in its bookstores. It is a truly appalling piece of crap; I wrote about in in July of 2004, and you can read excerpts from it online. One might argue that the appearance of the book is simply due to a lack of discrimination by the Park Service, which just shovels the gimcracks and gewgaws into their stores to make money, but apparently they try to exercise some due…

Student guest post: Chirp, Chirp, Sneeze!

Student guest post by Julia Wiederholt I don’t think there is a single person that can claim to have never had the joyous experience (sarcasm intended) of suffering from the influenza.  We all recognize the common symptoms that accompany this infectious little virus taking up residence in our bodies: the chills accompanying a fever, the total body ache, the nausea, and overall feeling of malaise.  Typically this virus comes and goes within a week without serious side effects.  When novel strains of the influenza pop up however, there can be more serious complications as your body lacks a…

An Open Mouse

A few months ago I got in my car and drove north until I reached a remarkable building filled with several million mice. At Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, scientists are studying mice to understand many mysteries of genetics and medicine. But I was particularly curious about a project that they've only recently launched: an attempt to understand how many genes working together give rise to complex traits. When those complex traits go awry, the result may be a common disease such as heart disease, diabetes, or cancer. The article I wrote about what I learned, "Mendel's Mouse,"…

Science Online Died. Why?

Science Online was an amazing annual unconference that started a few years back and grew and became part of the reshaping of public communication about science. This year, the people running the conference started out with the plan to move the conference to a new venue, Atlanta, and last week abruptly announced that the conference would not happen and the ScienceOnline organization would be shut down. Those who paid the registration fee would be refunded. A few science writers and bloggers are writing about how great ScienceOnline was and how much it will be missed, and some are providing a…

Evolution & altruism

Olivia Judson's piece The Selfless Gene in The Atlantic is a pretty good survey of the various theories of the evolution of altruism. If you read Narrow Roads of Gene Land or Natural Selection and Social Theory, nothing new, but if you aren't familiar with the lay of the land it's worth checking out. But you can't find it free online, so you'll have to get a subscription to The Atlantic or run out to the book store and sneak a peak.

Honeybee genome completed!

The honeybee genome project has been finished and a bunch of papers are coming out tomorrow. As soon as they become available online I will comment, at least on the one paper that shows that the molecular machinery of the bee circadian clock is much more similar to the mammalian clock than the fruitfly clock - something that makes me very excited. In the meantime, you can read more about the bees and their genome on The Loom, The Scientist, Scientific American and EurekAlert.

Off to Montreal

I'm going to be less active for a few days. Going to Montreal (for the first time) for the 17th Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy. I'll be moderating a panel on the new landscape of online advertising, featuring Microsoft's Kim Howell, the Center for Digital Democracy's Jeff Chester, and Mike Zaneis of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. There may be some denialism afoot, in which case I'll project a card or two on the screen. Anyone have any restaurant suggestions?

"Vacation"

...or, really, another swing to Ohio to drop off the kids. Their school-based daycare ended today, so I'm currently somewhere in a little place on Lake Huron to camp for two days, then I'll be in Ohio for a few hours to drop them off with relatives, and then back to Iowa on Monday. I have a few posts scheduled, and as always, any comments caught in the spam filter will have to wait until I'm back online after the weekend--apologies in advance.

Notices of the AMS special issue on Kurt Godel

Harald Hanche-Olsen, in the comments on my earlier post about the Principia Mathematica, has pointed out that this months issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society is a special issue in honor of the 100th anniversary of Kurt Gödels birth. The entire issue is available for free online I haven't read much of the journal yet; but Martin Davis's article The Incompleteness Theorem is a really great overview of the theorem abnd the proof, how it works, and what it means.

Oprah may not have puked at the mention of atheism! It's a breakthrough!

Greg Laden reports that Oprah actually had positive things to say about the quality of life in Denmark, and may even have been non-condemning in a brief comment about their godlessness. I am shocked, shocked I tell you, that Greg spends his afternoons watching Oprah. But after that, I'm mildly and pleasantly surprised. I doubt that much was said about it (parts of the program are online, but no, I simply can't bear to watch it), but at least it's one tiny step toward mainstreaming atheism.

Open Humanities Press

Peter Suber relays the announcement (and add some more) of the Open Humanities Press, a collection of seven Open Access journals (a humanities PLoS of sorts) in critical and cultural theory. Humanities bloggers have been way ahead of science bloggers in regards to posting their own work (including ideas, hypotheses and rough drafts) online, yet official humanities publishing has lagged behind natural sciences and medicine when it comes to adopting Open Access, so this is a very positive move on their part.

Do You Worry Too Much?

tags: worry, online quiz Your Worry Factor is 67% The amount you worry is definitely borderline unhealthy. Even when things are going well, you find yourself fixating on the negatives. Try to remember the times you've been able to let your worries go. If you can do that again, you'll be much happier! Do You Worry Too Much? Have you ever been able to "let your worries go"? I haven't, but then again, I have very good reasons to worry all the time!

What Kind of Chocolate Are You?

tags: chocolate, online quiz You are Dark Chocolate You live your life with intensity, always going full force. You push yourself (and others) to the limit... you want more than you can handle. An extreme person, you challenge and inspire the world! What Kind of Chocolate Are You? Hey, that's my favorite kind of chocolate, how did they guess? (By the way, if you are interested to read a little more about chocolate and alcoholism, I recently wrote a story that you might enjoy).

Do You Belong In NYC or LA?

tags: online quiz, NYC, LA You Belong in New York You're a girl on the go, and LA's laid back lifestyle isn't really your thing. You prefer a city that never sleeps, and people as ambitious as you are. Cultured and street smart, you can truly appreciate everything New York has to offer. Are You an LA Girl or a NY Girl? I think I was stretching the boundaries since I think my answers made me really close to "half and half". How about you?

How Many People Died The Day You Were Born?

Here's another one of those silly online quizzes for you to play with before you get down to work; 122,466 People Created by OnePlusYou Several of the people who died on my birthday throughout history include; 2007 - Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, Saudi brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden 2007 - Molly Ivins, American political columnist and author 1974 - Samuel Goldwyn, Polish-born film studio executive 1956 - A. A. Milne, English author 1944 - Jean Giraudoux, French writer 1933 - John Galsworthy, English writer, Nobel laureate

Soccer (Futebol) Chick

Dontcha love photoshop? (more below the fold) I didn't get to see the last match in the World Cup. Needless to say, I was disappointed. But a friend emailed this really cute picture, which I had to share with all of you (of course). I also wanted to include a link to an online game where you could make Zidane headbash Italian players to earn a score, but it appears that site has been temporarily shut down due to excessive web traffic. Bummer. . tags: World Cup, futebol, soccer

Fuk-D: radiation monitoring

The Japanese Atomic Energy Authority has online environmental radiation monitors. The list of stations is here. View Larger Map The monitoring station at O-arai is the one between Fukushima and Tokyo. Ambient radiation levels there are 30-40 nGy per hour. Current levels are around 300 nGy/h - ten times normal. Acute radiation effects are seen around a dosage of a Gy, so long way to go - currently getting close to μGy/h. Things get serious around milliGy/h. 7 day graph is here Watch that curve.

Who Dies in the last Harry Potter Book? (Poll Results)

tags: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, books,online poll results I asked you all a few days ago who you thought would die in the last Harry Potter book, and I have posted the results below the fold, as promised. Due to a mix-up at Amazon, I did not receive my copy of the Harry potter book, so I can only report spoilers (which may or may not be true) instead of writing a review of the book itself. But I can post the poll results;

What Chinese Year Should You Have Been Born Under?

tags: chinese new year, online quiz I am a DOG? And I am most compatible with a tiger or horse? You Should Have Been Born Under: You are totally loyal, faithful, and honest. However, you don't trust others to be as ethical as you are! Straight forward and direct, you really aren't one for small talk. You are a great listener - and an agreeable companion when you're in a good mood! You are most compatible with a Tiger or Horse. What Year Should You Have Been Born Under?

Anthro Blog Carnival

The ninety-first Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Sexy Archaeology. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology! And keep those hands where I can see them, OK? Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Sam at Sorting Out Science. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is on 9 June. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.

Anthro Blog Carnival

The eighty-seventh Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Anthropology in Practice. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology! Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Ciarán at Ad hominin. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is on 28 April. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro. And check out the latest Skeptics' Circle!

Anthro Blog Carnival

The eighty-third Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at the Primate Diaries. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology! Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to the keeper of A Primate of Modern Aspect. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is in less than a month, on 27 January. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.

Anthro Blog Carnival

The eighty-second Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Anthropology in Practice. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology! Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Eric at the Primate Diaries. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is in less than a month, on 13 January. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.

Anthro Blog Carnival

The eighty-first Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Spider Monkey Tales. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology! Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Krystal at Anthropology in Practice. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is in less than a month, on 30 December. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.

Swedish Runic Corpus On-line

Here's an extremely useful resource. The Swedish National Heritage Board has scanned the great multivolume corpus publication of Swedish runic inscriptions, Sveriges runinskrifter, and put it on-line for free. Currently as PDF files, but in the future there will also be a structured database. Though the PDF:s have been run through optical character recognition, they don't seem to have been indexed on Google (yet?). For an example, read about (p. 547 ff) Kalv's runestone U 875 at Focksta in Hagby, Uppland, shown above.

ScienceBlogs in Online Journalism Review

I and several other ScienceBloggers were recently interviewed for an article in the Online Journalism Review, a project associated with the Annenberg Center at USC. That article is now available on their website to read for those who are interested. I didn't ask the author of the article, Steve Bryant, to link to the Panda's Thumb or to Michigan Citizens for Science, but he did and that makes me happy. Tara Smith, Tim Lambert and PZ Myers were also interviewed for the article.

New Mircheva Photograph Subverts Beauty

My talented on-line buddy, Birmingham-based design student Tatyana Mircheva, has a new photo blog where she puts up some really interesting stuff. This series is a feminist commentary on the superficiality and narcissism of the beauty industry. The young woman worships her own reflection in the mirror, turning gradually into a Playboy Bunny. It's the same theme as in Mircheva's bike crash photo: young women aestheticising themselves to death, becoming pretty corpses. [More blog entries about art, photography; konst, fotografi.]

Carnivalia

The thirty-eighth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at A Very Remote Period Indeed. Archaeology and anthropology, and all seen in relation to the the Rice Track/Soccer Stadium in Houston, Texas. The next open hosting slot is on 4 June. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me. No need to be an anthro pro. But you must be a trustee of the Rice Track/Soccer Stadium, like me. And check out the new Skeptics' Circle!

I love the internet.

News #1 Felicia Day, the cutest girl on the internet, is going to be a guest patient on House tonight. If you are Bill O'Reilly or Oprah Winfrey and you dont know who Felicia Day is, welcome to the internet! Get your butt over to Hulu to watch 'Dr. Horrible', and YouTube to watch 'The Guild'. News #2 Michael Moore just released his latest movie, 'Slacker Uprising'. Hes releasing it online, for free. Gonna watch it after House :P

Environmental Health Perspectives on Framing and Science Communication

The journal Environmental Health Perspectives leads off its December issue with a news feature on the relevance of framing research to science communication. For readers who have followed recent review articles at Nature Biotechnology and the American Journal of Botany, the news feature adds additional insights. EHP is a monthly journal of peer-reviewed research and news on the impact of the environment on human health. EHP is published by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and its content is free online.

Framing Science at AAAS: Moving Beyond Gore's Message

As I posted yesterday, this weekend at the annual AAAS meetings in Boston, I will be presenting as part of the panel on "Communicating Science in a Religious America." I will also be participating in a second session that focuses on news coverage of climate change. Other panelists include Andrew Revkin of the NY Times, Pallab Ghosh of the BBC News, and AAAS Chair John Holdren of Harvard University. For a preview of some of my presentation, see this recent Skeptical Inquirer Online article: "Moving Beyond Gore's Message."

Pedophile attempts to justify his views - Dunford kicks him to the curb

Mike Dunford responds to a pedophile ("Sam") that has appeared at Shelley's blog - an idiot who compares the treatment of pedophiles to the treatment of Jews and African-Americans and feels that "[p]edophilia needs no endorsement, it is a beautiful and natural part of the world's culture." Mike handled this in a more restrained manner than I ever could. "Sam" is entitled to spew this crap online - thats why we have a First Amendment. I just hope that he never puts his words into actions.

Threats subverted, torture ignored, Twitter defended, and other short takes

Ed Yong examines how a simple writing exercise helps break vicious cycle that holds back black students. The Questionable Authority considers The Torture Memos, Medical "Professionals", and the Hippocratic Oath. Jessica Palmer, in a healthy display of online media's corrective power, tries to make clear that For the last time: that "Twitter is Evil" paper is not about Twitter!. Zimmer takes a tour of assisted migration. Effect measure argues the lack of universal health care in the US is morally and fiscally bankrupt.

Clothes for atheists

A Product of Evolution is an online store which "provide[s] intelligent designs for free thinking truth seekers." The products, which include mens and women's T-shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies, and mugs, are "inspired by...the natural beauty of evolution, science, truth and free inquiry." On the right is one of the garments sold at the store. The cotton T-shirt reads "God Free: all natural 100% nonreligious". It is available in white, ash grey and light blue and costs $20.99. [Via Travis Morgan]

Valentine's Day Lesson #1

This was sent by MF (initials are meant to keep my source out of trouble, I hope that I won't be subpoenaed on this one): Menstrual cycle phase modulates reward-related neural function in women In other words, giving roses at the wrong time will do nothing for you! Ref: Jean-Claude Dreher , Peter J. Schmidt , Philip Kohn , Daniella Furman , David Rubinow , and Karen Faith Berman Menstrual cycle phase modulates reward-related neural function in women PNAS (07) Advanced Online Publication 10.1073/pnas.0605569104

Congratulations Phoenix Team! Another Fine Landing on Mars!

Congratulations to the Phoenix landing team for an absolutely best-scenario landing! I tuned in for the landing on NASA TV online. Seeing all the tension and excitement at Mission Control got me positively bouncing in my desk chair. I was just amazed that everything happened exactly how it should. We now have 3 active robots on Mars providing us scientific data. Did you ever in your wildest dreams imagine this? Additionally, this was the first propulsion landing since the Viking lander, over 30 years ago.

My Boskone Schedule

The usual "This is the stuff that looks interesting to me" post, based on the preliminary online program. Subject to change if they move things around, or if I discover something I overlooked that sounds more interesting, or if I decide I'm hungry, and opt to blow off panels in favor of food. This year's program is lighter on panels, but includes both a signing and a reading. Which will be a very different experience than years past... Friday 7pm Harbor 1: The Singularity: An Appraisal Arguably the idea of the Singularity -- a period where change happens so quickly that life afterwards is…

Neil Munro goes after Riyadh Lafta

Neil Munro has had another go at the Lancet studies. This time he has gone on right-wing talk shows to attack Riyadh Lafta. On Glenn Beck he claimed This study -- the guys in this study have not shown the forms and the date and the sheets collected by the surveyors who worked for an Iraqi without U.S. supervision. This particular Iraqi was once employed by Saddam Hussein, where he produced crummy scientific papers as part of Saddam`s effort to lift economic sanctions in the 1990s. On Mike McConnell he elaborated (search for "neil munro" at the link): The strange thing is that the entire…

Quote mining about secondhand smoke

Not surprisingly, in response to my article on the health risks of secondhand smoke yesterday, the "skeptics' came out in force, although I must admit that even I hadn't expected quite as large an influx as what appeared. Perhaps I'll prepare a general response in the near future (and, no, I didn't take the Surgeon General's report as the be-all and end-all, but it did make a compelling case for SHS causing increasing the risk of lung cancer and cardiovascular disease at least, and it also served as a convenient aggregator of the many, many studies out there). In the meantime one commenter…

The New York Times posts stupid stuff

Some people have joked that journalists have a tendency to always present "alternative viewpoints" even when the sides are not symmetrical in their cogency or credibility, e.g., "Earth is a sphere, views differ." That being said, this article about the controversy over blogging etiquette, and specifically the Kathy Sierra controversy really pisses me off because of this passage: That may sound obvious, but many Internet veterans believe that blogs are part of a larger public sphere, and that deleting a visitor's comment amounts to an assault on their right to free speech. It is too early to…

Picks and interviews from ResearchBlogging.org [Cognitive Daily]

Here's this week's list of notable posts from Psychology and Neuroscience at ResearchBlogging.org. Is autism really surging? Michelle Dawson wonders whether the recent rise in autism rates can be traced to methodological differences in studies tracking autism rates. We know many men are attracted to younger women, but what does it mean to look younger? Wayne Hooke looks at a recent study and concludes that looking younger may be a matter of looking less masculine. Ever had a song that you just can't get out of your head -- an "earworm"? You'd think that psychologists would be all over…