Links Dump
drorzel | March 18, 2009
bs / 17 / 03 / 2009 / News / Home - Inside Higher Ed
"[A] panel at the annual meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication considered the question of âEmpty Rhetoric and Academic Bullshit: Strategies for Compositionâs Self-Representation in National Arenas.â In the discussion, participants differed on how much of a problem their language is â and because this is a meeting of language and rhetoric experts, the discussion referenced issues that were personal to scholarsâ work and values."
(tags: education academia writing humanities inside-higher-ed)
Two Cents on AIG Â…
drorzel | March 17, 2009
The Mid-Majority: The Court and the Conference Room Â
"Back when I was in college, there wasn't a day I loved more than Selection Sunday. I would sit in front of the television as the details were leaked out, tried to keep up by scratching excited team acronyms and codes on my blank bracket. I felt that euphoria of emotional overload that only comes when incoming information overwhelms the brain's ability to process it. It was a relevation of order from chaos, the bridge between darkness and light, every gift-giving holiday wrapped into one big and glorious package."
(tags: blogs sports…
drorzel | March 16, 2009
Book Vs. Film: Watchmen | Books | A.V. Club
Moore and Gibbons vs. Zach Snyder
(tags: comics movies literature books avclub)
First Lensman (1950), by E.E. âDocâ Smith | Books | A.V. Club
"First Lensman combined a lot of elements that, over the course of reading classic science fiction, have come to drive me nuts: Flat characters, shadeless morality, breathlessly detailed battle scenes, oh-yeah-then-this-happened pacing, and a prose style thatâs functional at best. At the heart of the story are Virgil Sammsâthe First Lensman of the titleâand Rod âThe Rockâ Kinnison. You wonât find two more…
drorzel | March 15, 2009
Cocktail Party Physics: measles, mumps, rubellaor autism
"Let me throw just a few statistics at you, just to illustrate how important vaccines have been in the increasing quality of public health in the US alone.
* The incidence of polio dropped to nearly zero by 1960 (polio vaccine introduced in 1955)
* Measles cases dropped sharply between 1955 and 1970 (measles vaccine introduced in 1963)
* The incidence of congenital rubella syndrome dropped from an estimated 20,000 in 1964 to 7 in 1983 (the rubella vaccine was introduced in 1967)"
(tags: science society medicine history…
drorzel | March 14, 2009
The Washington Monthly
"Watching the evisceration, I couldn't help but wonder why it takes a comedian on Comedy Central to do the kind of interview the non-fake news shows ought to be doing. When the media establishment marvels at Jon Stewart's popularity, they tend to think it's his humor. It's not. It's because he calls "bullsh*t" when most major media players won't. He did so last night, and it made for important viewing."
(tags: politics economics stupid television journalism business)
Tournament of Books - Shadow Country v. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks - The…
drorzel | March 13, 2009
Spaceflight Now | Breaking News | Did the Phoenix spacecraft find liquid water on Mars?
Maybe.
(tags: science astronomy news space planets)
How Vise Grip Pliers Saved My Life - Stories about How Vise Grips is a Toolbox Hero - Popular Mechanics
"Can Vise-Grips save a life? Sure, and they can replace a stick shift, save a marriage and clamp blood vessels. They can do all this, and so much more. PM shares ten "unbelievable tales" of rescue and ingenuity from Irwin's "Tell Us Your Vise-Grip Story" contest."
(tags: silly tools)
Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / The Wheel…
drorzel | March 12, 2009
Matthew Yglesias » The DC Voucher Program Has Nothing to Do With Sidwell Friends
"Virtually none of the recipients of the DC voucher program could go to Sidwell Friends like Barack Obamaâs kids. For one thing, they couldnât get in. And for another thing, they couldnât come close to affording the tuition. But the former point is actually more fundamental. Elite schoolsâbe they colleges, high schools, or whateverâare largely in the business of selecting their own students. Sidwell has a lot of interest in having Barack Obamaâs kids as students. Sidwell has virtually no interest in having…
drorzel | March 11, 2009
Science in the open » Why good intentions are not enough to get negative results published
"The fundamental problem is that the âwe need a journalâ approach is stuck in the printed page paradigm. To get negative results published we need to reduce the barriers to publication much lower than they currently are, while at the same time applying either a pre- or post-publication filter."
(tags: science publishing open-access journals)
Open Reading Frame
"If the primary measure of a journal's value is its impact -- pretty layouts and a good Employment section and so on being presumably…
drorzel | March 10, 2009
The Business of Academic Publishing
"This statement by Deutsche Bank is an astonishing comment on the profitability of the industry. The notion that Elsevier, and therefore the other commercial publishers, add âlittle value to the publishing processâ and cannot justify the high profit margins is significant. This statement by Deutsche Bank, while aimed towards investors, reveals the skepticism of investment analysts regarding the value that Elsevier, and therefore other firms with similar business models, claim to add to the publishing process.
If the large publishers provide little value…
drorzel | March 6, 2009
Michael Faraday, grand unified theorist? (1851) « Skulls in the Stars
"The common thread of many of these discoveries is their goal: demonstrating that all the physical forces of nature are but different manifestations of a single, âuniversalâ force. This idea was a surprisingly modern one for Faradayâs time, and is known today as a unified field theory. Such research was likely on the minds of many researchers of that era, however: once Ãrsted discovered that a magnetic compass needle could be deflected by an electric current, the notion that all forces might be related was a…
drorzel | March 5, 2009
For Free Throws, 50 Years of Practice Is No Help - NYTimes.com
"Since the mid-1960s, college menâs players have made about 69 percent of free throws, the unguarded 15-foot, 1-point shot awarded after a foul. In 1965, the rate was 69 percent. This season, as teams scramble for bids to the N.C.A.A. tournament, it was 68.8. It has dropped as low as 67.1 but never topped 70."
(tags: sports statistics basketball)
Chu Seeks Global Effort on Cleaner Coal Plants : ScienceInsider
"Secretary of Energy Steven Chu wants the United States to join with other countries on a "true engineering…
drorzel | March 4, 2009
The Verne Gun â KarlSchroeder.com
"I call it the Verne gun because frankly, a name like THE ATOMIC CANNON would just not go over well in certain circles. In any case, the principle is the same as Verne's original idea, but using modern technology: you set off a nuclear charge underground where the blast, heat, radiation and fallout can all be contained, and use Orion-type technology to direct its energy into orbiting a very big, very heavy spacecraft. This vessel would experience hundreds to thousands of g's of acceleration--you couldn't put humans in it. But Wang calculates that a 10…
drorzel | March 3, 2009
Science in the open » What is the cost of peer review? Can we afford (not to have) high impact journals?
"I believe in post-publication peer review because it reduces the costs and time wasted in bringing work to community view and because it makes the filtering and quality assurance of that published work continuous and ongoing. But in the current context it offers significant cost savings. A significant proportion of published papers are never cited. To me it follows from this that there is no point in peer reviewing them."
(tags: science blogs publishing journals)
Built on Facts :…
drorzel | March 2, 2009
Foodie Politics | The American Prospect
"Good food -- the sort Waters features at her restaurant -- is considered a luxury of the rich rather than a social justice issue. As Waters frequently argues, no one is worse served by our current food policy than a low-income family using food stamps to purchase rotted produce at the marked-up convenience store. Her vision is classically populist: It democratizes the concrete advantages health, pleasure, nutrition -- that our current food system gives mainly to the wealthy. But her language is suffused with the values and the symbols of, well, the…
drorzel | March 1, 2009
The Neon Season - Why I Would Not Have Greenlit Dollhouse
"Last night I watched an episode of a show I had been avoiding due to issues I had with the premise, despite the creator having written some of my favorite TV shows. It had every single problem I would have expected it to have based on my knowledge of the premise, and I wondered why, apart from the Whedon name, executives would have greenlit a show so clearly destined for early cancellation."
(tags: television SF writing)
drorzel | February 28, 2009
Cowbirds in Love
Mad science vs. mad engineering
(tags: science comics silly)
Analysis of the price of a piece of a lego set | Dot Physics
There's nothing you can't do with a least-squares fit.
(tags: blogs math statistics kid-stuff toys dot-physics)
drorzel | February 27, 2009
Setshot: Basketball for the Aging and Infirm: "That guy is better than he looks": Appearance vs. ability
"Here's a topic I think about all the time: What factors most affect opinions about players' skills, and by what process do those opinions change? In pickup basketball, there are often unknown players rotating into the playing roster. For purposes of team selection, shot distribution and defensive assignment, other players must evaluate them quickly and make uninformed assessments about their prospective abilities. It's like speed dating."
(tags: blogs sports basketball)
Change Into a…
drorzel | February 26, 2009
362 - Greek To Me: Mapping Mutual Incomprehension « Strange Maps
""Has there been a study of this phrase phenomenon, relating different languages on some kind of Directed Graph?â Well apparently there has, even if only perfunctorily, and the result is this cartogram.
When a Hellenophone has trouble understanding something, his or her preferred languages of reference, as far as incomprehension is concerned, are Arabic and Chinese. And while for Arabs the proverbial unintelligible language is Hindi, for Chinese itâs⦠the language of Heaven."
(tags: culture silly language world)
Amazon.com…
drorzel | February 25, 2009
The Problem of Pretension. « The Internet Food Association
Is it pretentious to insist on fresh food for school lunches?
(tags: food politics class-war)
the physics arXiv blog » Blog Archive » Calculating the cost of dirty bombs
Basically the same analysis that's in "Physics for Future Presidents," with some added financial figures. Bottom line: Don't worry too much about "dirty bombs."
(tags: science physics politics war nuclear)
Lovely Steampunk-esque Science Teaching Instruments. - Boing Boing
BoingBoing discovers TeachSpin, makers of high quality scientific demonstration…
drorzel | February 24, 2009
slacktivist: Saving newspapers
"I'm glad at least though that Time and Isaacson are trying to deal with the question of newspapers' survival. That's more than I can say for many of the newspapers themselves. Take for example my employer, the largest newspaper chain in the country. They own dozens of newspapers, small and large, which puts them in an ideal position to experiment with various approaches and business models to figure out what is and isn't working. But they don't seem interested in such experimentation -- instead remaining focused on uniformity throughout the chain, as though…