blogosphere
bioephemera | September 6, 2009
The editors of the Columbia Journalism Review weigh in on the media's uneven treatment of the health care debate:
So far this year 55 percent of coverage of health care has been about the political battles, 16 percent about the protests, and only 8 percent about substantive issues like how the system works now, what will happen if it remains unchanged, and what proposed changes will mean for ordinary people. To help reporters understand and analyze the debate, The Commonwealth Fund has sponsored a special supplement to the September/October issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.
Supposedly…
bioephemera | September 4, 2009
This enraged, possibly rabid, antlered and befanged squirrel (?) encapsulates the spirit of my week so well, I just had to share. TGIF, friends.
Via Crappy Taxidermy, of course.
bioephemera | August 19, 2009
For me, back-to-school shopping was always accompanied by a frisson of anticipation and excitement. It was the only time of year I actually got to go on a shameless shopping spree - which required leaving town and adventuring an hour or two north to find a wider selection of department stores. I didn't care about clothes much, so it wasn't the clothes I really cared about, but what they represented: the possibility that if I just hit on the right costume, the right ensemble of luscious jewel-toned sweaters and tights and matching socks (this being the 80s and 90s), I'd suddenly enter into a…
bioephemera | August 17, 2009No, I'm not being rude, I promise! The Gates Foundation is matching DonorsChoose donations to high-need schools. They'll fund 50% of any classroom project request that prepares students in rural and high-poverty schools for college, up to $4.1 million.
Just jump in and pick from a list of projects eligible for matching funds here. Here's a project that caught my eye:
One of my former students had done water rockets at his school in another state. He introduced this to me and I have been hooked on it ever since then. Normally, I have teaching funds from our state. This year my funds have been…
bioephemera | August 14, 2009How NOT to practice medicine - no matter how bad the health care situation gets:
Benson has no medical degree. His expertise comes from his youth, which was spent on a farm in Indiana. "When one of us needed medical attention," he told me, "we dipped into our veterinary supplies." According to Benson, many pharmaceuticals for animals are the same as those formulated for humans, and can be purchased without a prescription at veterinary supply stores, of which most rural communities have several. In figuring out how to translate livestock dosages to human ones, Benson offers this jaunty rule of…
bioephemera | August 6, 2009The initial reviews of Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's new book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future produced a small blogospheric kerfuffle last month. But I think Unscientific America has much more constructive and useful things to offer than provoking more arguments, and there are a lot of reviews focusing on the positives. This surprisingly short but wide-ranging book is a nutshell primer on science policy and communication issues, perfect for dissatisfied lab rats who want to engage in advocacy but don't have communications or policy training outside…
bioephemera | August 5, 2009So on my return to regular Scienceblogging, I see that Mike the Mad Biologist and Razib are taking exception to a point made by Megan McArdle in the Atlantic. McArdle observes that the heritability of weight is quite high - almost as high as the heritability of height:
Twin studies and adoptive studies show that the overwhelming determinant of your weight is not your willpower; it's your genes. The heritability of weight is between .75 and .85. The heritability of height is between .9 and .95. And the older you are, the more heritable weight is.
Okay: how you take that statement depends…
bioephemera | July 18, 2009Or is it Arma-goo-ddon?
For some reason, balls of unidentified biological goo have started showing up in the news. First we had the mysterious North Carolina sewer blob. It turned out that was just a colony of tubifex worms - yes, the same kind you feed your fish. But now we have a giant oceanic Alaskan goo ball:
"It's pitch black when it hits ice and it kind of discolors the ice and hangs off of it," Brower said. He saw some jellyfish tangled up in the stuff, and someone turned in what was left of a dead goose -- just bones and feathers -- to the borough's wildlife department.
"It kind of…
bioephemera | July 17, 2009Janet has a very interesting post over at Adventures in Ethics, springboarding off Chris Mooney & Sheril Kirshenbaum's new book Unscientific America. She discusses a key concept that seems obvious, but constantly ends up being ignored by both pro-science and anti-science factions: scientists are not a monolithic interest group. (For one thing, we disagree about how and when to approach the public, and how conciliatory to be).
Janet says,
I think it's fair to say that scientists and other members of Team Science are not in total agreement about which segments of the public can be…
bioephemera | July 15, 2009Wow. Here's another inexcusable case of bad science journalism - one that clearly has political motives. This is the lede from a story by Amanda Carpenter in this morning's Washington Times:
President Obama's top science adviser has toyed with extreme measures of population control, even suggesting in one book how to make it more publicly acceptable for the government to spike drinking water in order to sterilize people.
Wow! That would be quite a shocker - if it were true.
Honestly, this "news" article goes off the rails so hard in its first paragraph, I barely know where to start! First…
bioephemera | July 10, 2009Earlier, I blogged about the seriously flawed Telegraph article about rape. Now Carl Zimmer has discovered that the newspaper has yanked the article from its site. No explanation, no apology - it's just gone.
I feel silly that I didn't grab a screencapture of the original article. Although I'm aware that nothing is immutable on the Internet, it just didn't occur to me that someone would yank a published article from a newspaper with no explanation. I guess we have to think of online newspapers as unreliable AND impermanent. Ephemeral, in fact - just like the real, pulpy, newsprint-smudgy…
bioephemera | July 9, 2009Wow: it looks like PZ Myers and his fans are embroiled in a bit of a kerfuffle with Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum and their adherents over the new Mooney/Kirshenbaum book, Unscientific America.
First, PZ says the book is "useless." Chris says well, phooey, because plenty of other people like it. And then everybody calls one another "poopyheads" (or variants thereof) in the comments sections of both blogs, which are running into the hundreds.
I'm relieved to note that I am completing two big projects next week, so I won't have time to read my copy of Unscientific America for a couple…
bioephemera | July 8, 2009Readers, this week I had to do something I have never done before.
Specifically, I banned someone from BioE. Their comments will no longer appear here, and as the rest of you may notice when you comment, I've turned moderation on to enforce that. Unfortunately, that means everyone's comments will be slightly delayed. I apologize; I don't like it either.
There is a surprisingly common misperception about blogs: that any commenter has the right to say whatever they want in the comments, no matter how offensive, off-topic, rude, or annoying, and the blogger and the community just have to grit…
bioephemera | July 4, 2009Wow. . . coming off the Silence is the Enemy rape awareness initiative, it's more depressing than usual to see the Telegraph's latest bad science reporting. Their story implies that rape victims deserve blame for what happens to them:
Women who drink alcohol, wear short skirts and are outgoing are more likely to be raped, claim scientists at the University of Leicester (source).
Ben Goldacre of the excellent Bad Science blog didn't think so. So he tracked down the (student) author of the (unpublished) (MS) dissertation cited by the Telegraph. She said the article was completely wrong:
"We…
bioephemera | June 30, 2009Today is the last day of the Silence is the Enemy fundraising drive here at BioE - when I get my proceeds I'll send them along to Doctors Without Borders, probably along with a little extra, since I don't usually make an appreciable amount here at BioE. But I did notice a slight uptick in traffic this month, so thank you for the clicks! And don't forget about the issue of rape - these "awareness months" are supposed to raise awareness year-round, not make it seem like we've done our duty and don't need to think about it for the other 11/12 of the year (which I admit, I often do).
bioephemera | June 29, 2009John Timmer at Ars Technica discusses the results of a survey of bloggers which seems to suggest that, while most bloggers hold themselves to a reasonably high ethical standard, they don't necessarily expect other bloggers to do so.
I think it's kind of a weird idea to have a code of ethics for all bloggers, but that's because blogs are so diverse, not because I can imagine a situation in which I'd be deliberately violating such a code. My blog is a sort of mashup of art review, musings on communications and policies, and science coverage, and they're all different sorts of posts. When I blog…
bioephemera | June 25, 2009
a ten year old rape victim from the Congo
photo by Endre Vestvik
Almost a month ago, a number of bloggers launched Silence is the Enemy, a blog initiative against sexual violence. Since then, we've seen a number of thoughtful and provocative conversations throughout the blogosphere, trying to pinpoint the factors, like war, that can create a social climate where, tragically, rape is considered normal.
For example, consider this interview with Dumisani Rebombo, a South African man who sought forgiveness from the woman he gang-raped as a teenager:
A friend and my cousin pressured me to prove…
bioephemera | June 23, 2009
I'm here in DC at the Newseum for the State of Innovation Summit, a collaboration between SEED and the Council on Competitiveness. The crowd is pretty awesome - right now Adam Bly, SEED's CEO, is sitting a few rows from me with E.O. Wilson. Earlier, Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, talked about a conversation he'd had recently with Steven Chu about using the Smithsonian's resources to enhance public understanding of climate change. As he spoke, the intense sunshine of a summer day in DC played across the Smithsonian castle turrets directly behind him (the seventh floor…
bioephemera | June 13, 2009In a new post, scibling Bora asks whether science blogs are "real" publications and should be cited in other publications - like research articles. That's an interesting debate, and I encourage you to participate. I'm not going to get into it right now. Instead, I want to quote this section of his post:
There is a very interesting discussion on this topic in the comments section at the Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week blog, discussing the place of science blogs in the new communication ecosystem and if a blog post can be and should be cited. What counts as a "real publication"? Is the…
bioephemera | June 12, 2009
Turns out DC has, or once did have, a hidden subterranean labyrinth - and you thought it was just a plot device from last fall's South Park election special! Even better, it was dug by a lepidopterist. Take that, you engineers!
ONE of the oddest hobbies in the world is that of Dr. H. G. Dyar, international authority on moths and butterflies of the Smithsonian Institution, who has found health and recreation in digging an amazing series of tunnels beneath his Washington home.
The New York Times revealed its 50 most looked-up words, and Nieman Journalism Lab had commentary:
"All of the 25-cent…