book review
jdupuis | August 31, 2009"The past can survive only if it can beat out the future" (p. 142)
Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Laurence Lessig is a great and important book, one that should be read by anyone interested in the future of the Internet, culture and expression.
This book is a plea and an argument for a business model for culture and creativity, one in which supporters of the arts are willing to pay creators directly for their output. I'm not convinced. I'm also not not convinced.
Like the best non-fiction, this book engages you in an argument. I literally found myself…
grrlscientist | August 6, 2009tags: birding, bird watching, birds, Life List: A Woman's Quest for the World's Most Amazing Birds, Olivia Gentile, book review
I've written book reviews for most of my adult life, mostly because I liked talking about the books I've read but rarely found an audience, and also because I found this to be a great way to learn about interesting books that other people were reading. Since I've written a public blog for nearly five years, it was natural that I would publish my reviews on my blog, a practice that ended up adding a substantial number of books to my shelves at a time when I was…
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…
jstemwedel | July 17, 2009As promised, in this post I consider the treatment of the science-religion culture wars in Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum. If you're just tuning in, you may want to pause to read my review of the book, or to peruse my thoughts on issues the book raised about what the American public wants and about whether old or new media give the American public what it needs.
In the interests of truth in advertising, let me state at the outset that this post will not involve anything like a detailed rehash of "Crackergate", nor a…
jstemwedel | July 13, 2009In the post where I reviewed it, I promised I'd have more to say about Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. As it turns out, I have a lot more to say -- so much that I'm breaking it up into three posts so I can keep my trains of thought from colliding. I'm going to start here with a post about the public's end of the scientist-public communication project. Next, I'll respond to some of the claims the book seems to be making about the new media landscape (including the blogosphere). Finally, I'll take up the much discussed issue of the book's treatment of…
jstemwedel | July 11, 2009
Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.
by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum
Basic Books
2009
In this book, Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum set out to alert us to a problem, and they gesture in the direction of a solution to that problem. Despite the subtitle of the book, their target is not really scientific illiteracy -- they are not arguing that producing generations of Americans who can do better on tests of general scientific knowledge will fully address the problem that worries them. Rather, the issue they want to tackle is the American public's…
ejohnson | June 30, 2009This book review was originally posted by GrrlScientist on Living the Scientific Life.
tags: book review, Sleeping Naked is Green, green living, environment, Vanessa Farquharson
Carbon footprints, global warming, green living -- are these phrases an inconvenient truth that keep you awake at night, wondering how you can live in a more environmentally friendly way? For many people, merely contemplating these things is enough to make them give up trying to help the earth before they even start! But before you allow yourself to become discouraged, there is a book out there that will inspire you…
ejohnson | June 30, 2009This book review was originally posted by Greg Laden on Greg Laden's Blog.
previously reviewed
Birds: Nature's Magnificent Flying Machines is a book by Caroline Arnold and illustrated by Patricia Wynne for, I'd say, Pre-Elementary School kids and first/second grade. This is a good book to read to a pre-literate kid. Then put it away for later when the first grade academic report on birds is due ... it will be an excellent reference.
This is a well done and highly recommended book.
Birds... is highly specialized. It deals with only one topic: Bird flight. I like that. Who needs just…
ejohnson | June 30, 2009This book review was originally posted by GrrlScientist on Living the Scientific Life.
tags: book review, Unholy Business, religious antiquities, biblical antiquities, fraud, Christianity, Judaism, Nina Burleigh
There are two different types
of people in the world,
those who want to know,
and those who want to believe.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
In November 2002, an ancient carved limestone burial box designed to hold the disarticulated skeleton of a dead person was put on public display in Canada's Royal Ontario Museum. Although common throughout Israel, this particular box, known as an…
ejohnson | June 30, 2009This review was originally posted by Brian Switek on Laelaps
Since the early 20th century, at least, young earth creationists have attempted to blame Charles Darwin for genocide, world wars, and whatever political movements seemed most threatening at one time or another (i.e. communism). What Darwin is faulted with changes with the times, but most recently young earth creationists have focused on hot topics from Darwin's own era: racism and slavery. From the Answers in Genesis tract Darwin's Plantation to the upcoming (and unethically produced) documentary The Voyage That Shook the World,…
grrlscientist | June 28, 2009tags: book review, Sleeping Naked is Green, green living, environment, Vanessa Farquharson
Carbon footprints, global warming, green living -- are these phrases an inconvenient truth that keep you awake at night, wondering how you can live in a more environmentally friendly way? For many people, merely contemplating these things is enough to make them give up trying to help the earth before they even start! But before you allow yourself to become discouraged, there is a book out there that will inspire you to make changes in your life that are beneficial to the earth; Sleeping Naked Is Green:…
jdupuis | June 26, 2009Digital Natives will move markets and transform industries, education, and global politics. the changes they bring about as they move into the workforce could have an immendsely positive effect on the world we live in. By and large, the digital revolution has already made this world a better place. And Digital Natives have every chance of propelling society further forward in myriad ways -- if we let them. (p. 7)
Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser is a fine and useful book. Every page is brimming with facts and analysis…
grrlscientist | June 24, 2009tags: book review, Unholy Business, religious antiquities, biblical antiquities, fraud, Christianity, Judaism, Nina Burleigh
There are two different types
of people in the world,
those who want to know,
and those who want to believe.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
In November 2002, an ancient carved limestone burial box designed to hold the disarticulated skeleton of a dead person was put on public display in Canada's Royal Ontario Museum. Although common throughout Israel, this particular box, known as an ossuary, was unusual because it was inscribed. Even more remarkable, its ancient Aramaic…
ejohnson | June 15, 2009Originally published on Pharyngula
When I was growing up, I had no introduction to evolutionary theory. Sure, I assumed it was true, and I went through the usual long phase of dinosaur fandom, but I was never taught anything at all about evolution throughout my grade school education, and what little I did know was largely stamp-collecting. That all changed, though, when I went off to college.
I can't credit the schools I went to, unfortunately: most of my undergraduate education (with a few wonderful exceptions) was the usual mega-survey course, where the instructor stuck a funnel in our…
grrlscientist | June 13, 2009tags: book review, Falconer on the Edge, A Man, His Birds, and the Vanishing Landscape of the American West, falconry, hawking, Rachel Dickinson
Like most married people, Rachel Dickinson thought she knew her husband quite well after years of marriage. But one evening, he surprised her by unexpectedly bringing home a small brown paper bag containing an injured kestrel. You see, Dickinson's husband, Living Bird magazine editor Tim Gallagher, was a lapsed falconer without any birds, until this kestrel, Strawberry, reawakened his latent passion. As the bond between her husband and his tiny…
grrlscientist | June 12, 2009tags: book review, Animals Make Us Human, animal welfare, pets, farm animals, agriculture, Temple Grandin
What do animals need to have a good mental life? This question seems easy to answer until we realize that even though we can provide for an animal's physical welfare, we actually don't know that much about the specifics of an animal's emotional life and what they need to be happy. In this book, Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 2009), animal welfare guru Temple Grandin explores what the most commonly kept species of domestic…
jstemwedel | June 12, 2009The Free-Ride offspring are almost at the end of another school year, so we thought this would be a good time for them to think about some summer reading recommendations. Each of them chose two favorite books that have something to do with science. Below, they offer their kid-to-kid reviews.
The younger Free-Ride offspring's recommendations:
To help calibrate these recommendations, the younger Free-Ride offspring is 8 years old and is finishing second grade.
Magic School Bus Inside Ralphie: A Book about Germs by Scholastic Books
I got this book in the book exchange my class had and I read…
grrlscientist | June 9, 2009tags: book review, Plastic Fantastic, How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World, physics, ethics, fraud, Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Jan Hendrik Schön, Eugenie Samuel Reich
Physicist Jan Hendrik Schön was too good to be true. After graduating from the University of Konstanz in 1997, he was hired by Bell Labs in New Jersey, where he quickly rose to scientific fame. By 2000, he had published eight papers in the world's most prestigious journals, Nature and Science. One year later at the height of his career, he was publishing one scientific paper every eight days --…
dgmacarthur | June 4, 2009Regular readers of this blog will be well aware that we are currently in the middle of a technology-driven revolution in genetics, which promises both advances in our understanding of human biology and profound social transformation. As we move into the genomic era, developing familiarity with the basic concepts of genetics - so-called genetic literacy - will be increasingly important.
The goal of Mark Henderson's 50 Genetics Ideas You Really Need to Know is thus ambitious but timely: to distill the complexity of genetics into a series of digestible bite-sized chunks suitable for public…