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kkrisberg | June 7, 2016At Reveal, Jennifer LaFleur writes about the U.S. veterans who witnessed the country’s many nuclear weapon tests, the health problems they’ve encountered in the decades since their service, and their fight for compensation. One of the “atomic veterans” LeFleur interviewed — Wayne Brooks — said: “We were used as guinea pigs – every one of us. They didn’t tell us what it was gonna do to us. They didn’t tell us that we were gonna have problems later on in life with cancers and multiple cancers.” LaFleur writes:
All of the atomic vets were sworn to secrecy. Until the secrecy was lifted decades…
kkrisberg | January 19, 2016At Reveal, reporter Will Evans investigates discrimination within temporary staffing agencies, finding a pattern of racial, sexist and otherwise discriminatory hiring practices. He begins his story with Alabama-based Automation Personnel Services Inc., writing:
When its clients wanted to hire temp workers based on race, sex or age, Automation was happy to oblige, according to dozens of former employees.
Often, the practice was blatant. A manager at a Georgia manufacturing plant asked Christie Ragland not to send him “any black thugs,” she said. Ragland, a former Automation office manager…
dr. dolittle | January 17, 2014Amazon Prime Air might want to pay attention to this research. Scientists have studied the flight patterns of albatrosses to understand how the animals are able to sustain flight with minimal energy expenditure.
lborkowski | January 10, 2014In case you missed it before the holidays, ProPublica's excellent "Temporary Work, Lasting Harm" piece is well worth a read. (Univision also produced and aired a version of the story.) Michael Grabell, Olga Pierce, and Jeff Larson tell the story of 21-year-old Day Davis, a temporary worker killed on his first day working at a Bacardi bottling plant, and others who died while on temporary work assignments. A ProPublica analysis of workers' compensation claims in five states found that temporary workers face a significantly greater risk of on-the-job injuries compared to permanent employees.…
gregladen | December 1, 2013This makes total sense. Physics was unable to deliver us our flying cars or jet packs. But what were we going to do with them anyway? Well, go to the bookstore, of course! Alas, in the absence of advanced space age technology we are forced to drive, or even walk, to the bookstore.
But not any more, because Jeff Bezos at Amazon has promised us ... promised ... the new "Amazon Prime Air" service. This is where the books (and other stuff we order from Amazon.com) fly to us, encased in small brightly colored boxes that apparently we get to keep after the delivery. They fly attached to the…
dr. dolittle | September 29, 2013 Amazonian butterflies drinking turtle tears.Image from: Jeff Cremer / Perunature.com
The Amazon region is notoriously deficient in sodium because of its large distance from the ocean and because the Andes mountains block the delivery of windblown minerals from the West. Some minerals travel from the east, but much of the air is cleaned by rain before the minerals can make it to the western region of the Amazon Basin.
So if you were a butterfly, where would you find a readily available source of salt in the Amazon? The answer is not very obvious, unless you look at the photo of a yellow-…
gregladen | September 10, 2013What if you went to drive to work one day and the highway on ramp was closed, and a big sign across it said "Highway is closed. Sorry for the inconvenience."
Well, you would find your way to a different highway entrance. But say that one was closed as well.Then, you check around and find out that all the highways in your state are closed because the state decided to close them. No more highways for you.
Or, one day you go to check the mail and there is a single post card, and nothing else, in your mail box. The post card reads "The United States Postal Service has permanently suspended…
gregladen | April 5, 2013Napoleon Chagnon spent years living among the Yanomamo of Venezuela and wrote, among other things, a classic ethnography still used widely in anthropology classes. It came to pass that Chagnon and his ethnography came under scrutiny, actually a few waves of scrutiny, from practitioners of cultural anthropology in part because his monograph depicted the Yanomamo as “fierce people” and this characterization of them was used, misused really, against them by outside forces including the government to justify their “pacification.” The Yanomamo were indeed being abused by these outside forces, and…
lborkowski | December 20, 2011A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Vanessa Veselka at The Atlantic: In the Wake of Protest: One Woman's Attempt to Unionize Amazon
Marshall Allen at ProPublica: Without Autopsies, Hospitals Bury Their Mistakes
Maryn McKenna at Superbug: Fecal Transplants: They Work, the Regulations Don't
Jonathan Cohn at The New Republic: Ron Wyden, Paul Ryan, and the Future of Medicare
Shankar Vedantam at NPR: Marriage Economy: 'I Couldn't Afford to Get Divorced'
gregladen | December 1, 2011These are books that I've reviewed here, and would like to recommend that you seriously consider picking up if you are looking for a cool present for someone and you think they should read more science.
I'm including a couple of bird books in this list, but I also recently wrote up a summary of just bird books that you may want to check out.
These are in no particular order, and I'm not paying a lot of attention to publication dates. What matters is that I've I've put the book in this stack of books I've got here that I clean out every year about this time; Some are clearly older than…
lborkowski | October 4, 2011If you haven't already seen Spencer Scoper's in-depth story on working conditions at Amazon.com's Lehigh Valley warehouse, it's well worth a read. The Morning Call's investigation into the warehouse involved interviews with 20 current and former warehouse workers, and most of them were temporary employees hired by Integrity Staffing Solutions rather than Amazon itself. Workers reported that they were expected to maintain a demanding units-per-minute rate -- and it became especially hard to keep up the pace when summer temperatures inside the warehouse soared above 100 degrees. Scoper writes:…
gregladen | September 28, 2011Damn them. The Kindle Fire is about the same price as the higher end Kindle that I bought Julia just before her trip overseas.... oh well.
The Kindle Fire is an android based tablet designed to be an ebook.
Here's why I want one: An iPad, which is also an eBook reader but that does a lot more stuff than a Kindle Fire, weighs 1.33 pounds. The Kindle Fire weighs 14.6 ounces. That puts the Kindle Fire just under the threshold for comfortable reading where you don't have to prop it up. I'd like it to be lighter, but that's a good start. (The regular Kindle, by the way, weighs about 6…
laelaps | April 2, 2010
A margay (Leopardus wiedii). From Wikipedia.
Even if they spend years in the field, researchers rarely witness predation on primates. Cats, birds, and other hunters regularly feed on primate species, but what we know about the habits of primate-hunters often comes from bones and fingernails picked out of predator droppings. Every now and again, though, someone is in just the right place at just the right time to observe a predator attempt to catch a primate for dinner, and one recent observation in the Amazon has revealed an ingenious hunting technique employed by a small spotted cat.…
bioephemera | March 9, 2010Update: welcome Consumerist readers! While I use my own experience to illustrate concerns about third-party online merchants, this post is mainly about the bigger long-term informational problems I see with reputation, reliability, and online communities. Please feel free to weigh in!
A few weeks ago, I caught a familiar story on the local news. A local citizen had written in to the news team with a request for help after a local furniture company sold them a defective living room set, and wouldn't give them a refund. The news team went to the business, who - wary of the potential public…
tlambert | February 3, 2010Jonathan Leake recently wrote a story alleging that the statement in the IPCC AR4 WG2 that up to 40% of the Amazon forest could vanish due to climate change was "bogus". Deltoid can now reveal that Leake deliberately concealed the fact that Dan Nepstad, the author of the 1999 Nature paper cited as evidence for the claim about the vulnerability of the Amazon had replied to Leake's query and informed him the claim was basically correct:
At the time of the IPCC [report], there was ample evidence that a large portion of the Amazon forest is very close to the lower limit of rainfall that is…
drorzel | January 28, 2010I've toyed around in the past with ways to use the Amazon sales rank tracker to estimate the sales numbers for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. It's geeky fun, but not especially quantitative.
Yesterday, though, I found a reason to re-visit the topic: calibration data!
OK, "calibration data" is probably too strong a description. "Calibration anecdote" is more accurate.
Yesterday when I went into work a little after 10, a comment somebody made sent me to the actual Amazon page for the book, where I saw a little note next to the price information saying "Only 5 left (more are coming)-- order…
gregladen | July 26, 2009"Human nature" is an interesting topic. People will argue over the definition of human nature, but regardless of what people think or say, it is reasonable to assume that all humans share a psychological and developmental framework to the extent that any two people raised in the same background will 'turn out' similar with respect to several behavioral traits or tendencies. Also, a pair of twins separated at birth and raised up in very different cultures are likely to exhibit more differences than similarities owing to the different cultures but perhaps some set of seemingly uncanny…
grrlscientist | November 12, 2008tags: plants, giant water lilies of the Amazon, David Attenborough, streaming video
This video is a portion of the David Attenborough program about the lives of the giant water lilies of the Amazon region. It has some astonishing footage of the plants, its flowers and the habitat these plants provide. [4:27].
edyong | March 31, 2008You might not be that impressed to receive a clump of grass or branches on a first date, but a boto dolphin might think differently. A new study suggests that these Amazonian dolphins wave bits of flotsam to attract mates.
The boto is a freshwater river dolphin that swims through the currents of the Amazon and the Orinoco. They are elusive creatures that are difficult to study, so very little is known about their social lives.
Tony Martin from the University of St Andrews spent three years in the Amazonian Mamiraua reserve studying the behaviour of botos. During this time, he spotted over…
grrlscientist | December 14, 2007tags: Harry Potter, Tales of Beedle the Bard, books, JK Rowling, auction, Sotheby's, Amazon.com
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A Mystery Buyer purchased the only publically-available copy of JK Rowling's latest Harry Potter book, Tales of Beedle the Bard for £1,950,000 (US$3.98 million)! This is far more than the £50,000 ( $100,000) sale price that had been estimated by Sotheby's. The leather-bound and hand-written book was bought by a representative from London fine art dealers, Hazlitt Gooden & Fox. The proceeds generated by the sale of this book will benefit Rowling's new charity, The Children's…