education
grrlscientist | January 19, 2010tags: Vermilion Flycatcher, Galapagos Flycatcher, Darwin's Flycatcher, Pyrocephalus rubinus, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Male Vermilion Flycatcher, this striking species' large range (southwestern USA through Argentina) means that it is known by a variety of common names, such as the Galapagos Flycatcher or Darwin's Flycatcher, Pyrocephalus rubinus, photographed on the Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge, Anahuac, Texas. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Joseph Kennedy, 2 January 2010 [larger view].
Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with TSN-PZ camera…
grrlscientist | January 19, 2010tags: How It's Made: French Fries, food science, engineering, technology, streaming video
Long, skinny French fries .. are NOT EXTRUDED! Toldyaso! Don't believe me? Watch this video! Yes, I win this argument! Muahahahaha!
Vinegar on fries? Ew! But that's how those wacky Brits eat "chips", I guess.
gregladen | January 18, 2010Last weekend I attended Science Online 2010, which is a conference of science communicators with a heavy mix of bloggers, many journalists and others from the print industry, an increasingly large number of book authors, and OpenX (X=access, notebook, science, or whatever) advocates and practitioners.
Science Online is now reaching a tipping point. It is a fantastic conference partly because of its small size and its focus, but it is now becoming much more popular, and faces the possibility of growing over the next couple of years to become not what it is today. Perhaps it will evolve into a…
grrlscientist | January 18, 2010tags: Western Meadowlark, Sturnella neglecta, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Western Meadowlark, Sturnella neglecta, photographed on the Katy Prairie, Houston, Texas. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Joseph Kennedy, 1 January 2010 [larger view].
Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/800s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400.
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Rick Wright, author of Aimophila Adventures and Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide, writes:
The identification of silent…
grrlscientist | January 17, 2010tags: Eurasian Tawny-Eagle, Asian Tawny-Eagle, African Tawny-Eagle, Tawny Eagle, Aquila rapax, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Tawny Eagle, also known by a number of common names that reflect its wide-ranging status; Asian Tawny-Eagle, Eurasian Tawny-Eagle and African Tawny-Eagle, Aquila rapax, photographed at Nakuru National Park, Kenya, Africa. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Dan Logen, 29 July 2006 [larger view].
Nikon D2X, 200-400 mm lens at 400. ISO 200, 1/350, f/6.3.
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.…
bioephemera | January 17, 2010
A short (~4 minute) sweet overview of the political power of data visualization, by Tufte disciple Alex Lundry. He says so-called "dataviz" exists (you guessed it) "at the intersection of art and science." Quite right, sir!
You'll note Lundry makes use of the classic pirates-global warming relationship, Tufte's "pie charts suck" message, and so on. It's one of several good videos from a great event I really want to get to - igniteDC. I'd also like to mention that I'll be reviewing Connie Malamed's new book, Visual Language, which appears near the end of the video, in about a week or so, so…
grrlscientist | January 16, 2010tags: religion, IDiots, satire, parody, comedy, humor, fucking hilarious, Hitler, DOWNFALL, streaming video
The so-called Discovery Institute is a pretentious über-Christian disguise for creationism and an ultra-Conservative social agenda called The Wedge Strategy. So-called Intelligent Design theory is plagiarized from William Paley's long-refuted Blind Watchmaker argument, and is merely creationism in a not-so-cunning disguise.
Having neither facts nor logic at their disposal, the polemicists of the so-called Discovery Institute have been forced to resort to lies and subterfuge. One of…
bioephemera | January 16, 2010Speaking of China, two graphs from the brand-spanking-new Science and Engineering Indicators 2010:
I detect some trends.
grrlscientist | January 16, 2010tags: Two-banded Courser, Smutsornis (Cursorius) africanus gracilis, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Two-banded Courser, Smutsornis (Cursorius) africanus gracilis, photographed at Tarangire National Park, Tanzania, Africa. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Dan Logen, 30 August 2007 [larger view].
Nikon D2X, 200-400 mm lens at 400. ISO 200, 1/250, f/8.
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Review all mystery birds to date.
esiegel | January 15, 2010This is what science is all about; getting thrown a curveball by Nature and plunging in to find out what's going on. -Andy Albrecht
Imagine waking up in the morning and heading out into the sand dunes. They never look exactly the same from day to day. But each day that you go out, they'll look somewhat like this.
You consider yourself smart and well-informed, and you have a sense of adventure. So each morning, you venture out a little farther into the dunes. You find a variety of different features, but everything pretty much just looks like, well, sand dunes. One day, however, all of that…
mikethemadbiologist | January 15, 2010It might come as a shock to some, but, temperamentally, I'm conservative, at least when it comes to things that are critical. One of those things is education. So when I read in The Boston Globe that various groups want to increase the number of students in charter schools and also the number of charter schools (currently, about four percent of students attend charter schools), I really fail to understand why. Massachusetts, year in and year out, does incredibly well, if not leading the nation, on the NAEP tests. Likewise, if MA were a country, it would beat, hands down, all of Europe and…
grrlscientist | January 15, 2010tags: Delicate Owl, White Owl, Barn Owl, Tyto alba, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Barn Owl, occasionally known as the Delicate Owl, or more commonly as the White Owl, Tyto alba, photographed on the roadside in the Rio Grande Valley, the southernmost tip of Texas. This valley occurs at the boundary between the United States and Mexico. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: ©JRCompton.com/birds: JR Compton, 2008 [larger view]. [Added 19 April 2010: Link to photoseries of this bird]
Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/500s f/8.0 at…
grrlscientist | January 14, 2010tags: How it's Made: Aluminum Foil, aluminum, material science, chemistry, technology, streaming video
The video shows the process of producing everyday use aluminum foil from huge, raw aluminum ingots.
bioephemera | January 14, 2010Thanks to everyone who participated in the unscientific survey on commenting. The results are back, and I'd like to share them with you.
As many of you have noticed, we've been talking about comments a lot here lately, both at BioE and on Sb in general. There's also a big session on online civility coming up at SciOnline '10. So the main purpose behind the survey was to get you involved in that discussion.
I've brought the issues of uncivil and uninformed comments up in several posts, sometimes rather provocatively, but we already know that the majority of blog readers don't comment often,…
grrlscientist | January 14, 2010tags: Redhead, Pochard, Raft Duck, Red-headed Raft Duck, Aytha americana, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Redhead, also known by a slew of other names, including Pochard, Raft Duck and Red-headed Raft Duck, Aytha americana, photographed in Hermann Park, Houston, Texas. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Joseph Kennedy, 23 December 2009 [larger view].
Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/500s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400.
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Here's another image of a different…
grrlscientist | January 13, 2010tags: conservation, reptiles, King Cobra, Ophiophagus hannah, Gharial, Gavialis gangeticus, water pollution, Romulus+Whitaker, TEDTalks, streaming video
The gharial, Gavialis gangeticus, and king cobra, Ophiophagus hannah, are two of India's most iconic reptiles, and they're endangered because of polluted waterways. Conservationist Romulus Whitaker shows rare footage of these magnificent animals and urges us to save the rivers that sustain their lives and our own.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers…
grrlscientist | January 13, 2010tags: evolutionary biology, behavioral ecology, migration, microtechnology, geolocator, natural history, biological hotspots, longest migration, seabirds, Arctic Tern, Sterna paradisaea, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, peer-reviewed paper
Arctic Tern, Sterna paradisaea, Iceland.
Image: Arthur Morris, Birds as Art, 2007 [larger view].
Canon 400mm f/5.6L lens (handheld) with the EOS-1D Mark III. ISO 200. Evaluative metering +1/3 stop: 1/1000 sec. at f/5.6 in Manual mode. Manual Flash with Better Beamer at 1:1.
For decades, it was widely suspected that a small seabird, the…
grrlscientist | January 13, 2010tags: American Pipit, Buff-bellied Pipit, Anthus rubescens, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] American Pipit, also known as the Buff-bellied Pipit, Anthus rubescens, photographed at the Arthur Storey Park, Houston, Texas. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Joseph Kennedy, 28 December 2009 [larger view].
Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/500s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400.
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Review all mystery birds to date.
grrlscientist | January 12, 2010tags: Grab More Science, LabGrab, science news, technology, graphic, image of the day
Image: LabGrab, 13 January 2010.
An American start-up company in Portland, Oregon, announced the release of their new technology that creates a colorful chart to visualize the volume of science and medical stories published by discipline (above). The boxes are defined by discipline and their sizes are determined by the total number of article headlines published by universities, journals, science news aggregators, and science blogs within the given time period (as defined by the user).
"We read a…
bioephemera | January 12, 2010Attention all art/science web-collaborative types! Dave Ng has just formally announced the Phylomon Project. Here's the hook: a paper published in 2000 determined that an 8 year old could identify and characterize 120 different Pokemon characters, but when it comes to animals in their own backyard, kids have no clue.
There's nothing wrong with kids having rich fantasy worlds - far from it. But why not give them the chance to discover that real biology is also incredibly cool - not to mention complex, beautiful, and for many kids, right outside their back door? Maybe I'm showing my age, but…