Misc
apalazzo | February 3, 2009... strike again!
It's crazy but Boston (and Brookline in particular) is full of wild turkeys. Every once in a while you bump into a gang (or a gobble) of them. Baymate knew of one living near her in Washington Square. One day as one lady left Starbucks, baymate's turkey spotted her and proceeded to chase her down the block. The lady in question was heard screaming on her cell phone, "I have had a shitty day, my morning was bad and now there's a turkey chasing me down the street". Needless to say, baymate fell in love with this turkey. It became a fixture of the neighborhood. Then after a few…
amillikan | January 27, 2009ScienceBlogger Chris Mooney appeared on The Colbert report yesterday to discuss the Bush Administration's 'war on science.' According to Chris, the scientists won the war on science when President Obama was elected.
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The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Obama's New Science Policy - Chris Mooney
Colbert at ChristmasColbert Christmas DVD
Green ScreenBill O'Reilly Interview
"The Bush Administration was systematically undermining scientific knowledge on a lot of different issues that have a lot of different policy implications," Mooney said in the interview.
Colbert,…
ejohnson | January 26, 2009If you happen to have been to the ScienceBlogs homepage recently, you will have noticed that Sb has a new look! Yes, in the spirit of the times, we decided a little change would do us good.
From an editorial standpoint, we're pretty excited about the flexibility this new design gives us- those modules for "Video," "Peer Review," and "Community" are all interchangeable with other features of our choice, and The Buzz will also have manual inputs. That means that the Buzz will no longer feature posts about dinosaurs when the buzz is about salmonella (unless we want it to). Also gone is the…
ejohnson | January 22, 2009Recently, ScienceBlogger Jonah Lehrer pondered if the Bush Administration's stifling of climatology data did more than influence the scientific process—if it effected American psychology as well. But with a new administration comes a chance for free scientific expression, and as President Obama was being inaugurated, a study was released that asserts louder than ever that scientists believe global warming is being caused by human activity with a bold 97 percent of the active climatologists surveyed in agreement. However, according to the study, reported by James Hrynyshyn from Island of Doubt…
ejohnson | January 21, 2009The annual ScienceOnline convention held in North Carolina concluded on Sunday after a weekend of rousing conversations on a variety of science- and blogging-related topics, and the blogosphere is abuzz in reflection. As pioneers in the science blogging comunity, ScienceBlogs 'Sciblings' were quite a presence at the event with 20 in attendance—many of whom led sessions on topics ranging from anonymity and pseudonymity to gender in science. Feedback from the conference, as gathered by ScienceOnline founder Bora from A Blog Around the Clock, is "very positive."
amillikan | January 19, 2009In this week's Science Saturday, science writers Chris Mooney and Carl Zimmer look ahead at the scientific controversies and discoveries of the coming year. Will Craig Venter finally produce artificial life in 2009? Will NASA find proof of Martian life? Will the public become even less informed about science? And perhaps most importantly, will Obama's science policy improve on Bush's?
amillikan | January 17, 2009Today kicks off the first day of events of the third annual ScienceOnline conference in North Carolina. Founded in 2007 by veteran ScienceBlogger, Coturnix from A Blog Around the Clock, ScienceOnline is the first conference devoted to discussing science as its role changes with the expansion of the internet. Several ScienceBloggers have traveled far and wide to attend the conference and participate in the events.
amillikan | January 16, 2009In the emergent era of Big Science, will the work of small-scale genetics labs be overwhelmed—or worse, rendered obsolete—by massive genome studies like the International HapMap Project? Dan MacArthur of Genetic Future thinks that a happy equilibrium could be reached between the two approaches. "Big Genetics generates far more data than its participants can ever hope to analyse themselves," he writes, "and the hefty remainder is fodder for a plethora of small labs exploring small but important facets of the bigger picture."
tqa | January 16, 2009
Welcome to the seventh edition of The Giants' Shoulders - the monthly blog History of Science blog carnival.
Courtesy of the Digital Cuttlefish, we have a nice reminder of just why this whole insane thing we call "science" is so important:
They've hit upon something that multiplies thinking,
A process they like to call "science",
Where each person builds on the other ones' progress
Like standing on shoulders of giants.
Some say these "humans" are smarter than cuttlefish;
I won't be taking that bet!
But maybe--just maybe--with science to help them,
These humans... they might make it yet…
ejohnson | January 14, 2009Lately some ScienceBloggers have taken to tackling the age-old philosophical question, "What is science?" The ScienceBlogs mothership itself, Seed Media Group, has tackled this definition by assuming the mantra "Science is culture," while Matt Springer from Built on Facts argues the simplistic yet controversial view that science is "the testing of ideas," and Chad Orzel from Uncertain Principles endorses a more operational definition.
ejohnson | January 9, 2009Hi folks,
ScienceBlogs has grown an incredible amount since we got started—our 75 bloggers have composed over 88,000 posts, and as a community we have generated over a million comments. With all this activity, we've been feeling some growing pains recently, so this weekend we will be upgrading the software that drives the site.
Starting this afternoon (Friday, 1/9) at about 1pm Eastern time, we're going to shut down parts of the site for at least 24 hours (probably more like 36 hours)—specifically, the commenting and posting functions.
This means that the site will still be browsable, but…
amillikan | January 9, 2009With rumors swirling that President-elect Barack Obama has offered CNN Chief Health Correspondent Sanjay Gupta the nomination of Surgeon General—a position that involves serving as the operational head of the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps—ScienceBloggers are divided with respect to their support. While some bloggers have described the appointment as "cool" and "a good pick," others have doubts about his qualifications.
ejohnson | January 7, 2009It's common for students to take tests in large groups, but a new study suggests being exposed to greater competition may inhibit individuals from excelling. ScienceBlogger Jonah Lehrer attributed this finding to a common tendency of the brain to shut down when intimidated instead of working harder. "When it knows that it won't win the competition—there are just too many competitors—the mind is less willing to put in the effort," he wrote on The Frontal Cortex.
stoat | January 5, 2009To look at, anyway.
[ps: for anyone who watched while I put this together: apologies!]
amillikan | January 3, 2009In this week's featured episode of Science Saturday from Bloggingheads, George Johnson and John Horgan returned with new insight on the controversy provoked by their last appearance, including some negative comments directed toward ScienceBlogger Abbie from ERV.
Johnson admitted that he may have been reacting to his cumulative perception of lower-end blogging, the existence of which Horgan explained by 'The law of the conservation of bullshit'—no matter how much the information sphere expands, there's still going to be the same proportion of bullshit circulating throughout it.
But…
stoat | January 3, 2009JF comments on Malthus, which is my excuse for raising a question I've wondered about for a bit (without being sufficiently interested to actually read M, so for all I know I'm perpetuating common misreadings): M assumes exponential population growth (for which there is some basis) and linear food growth, for which there is no apparent basis at all. To first order (in an economy with little mech), it would seem to be natural to assume that food output is proportional to the number of people working the land. Or, if you assumed that land output and land area was fixed, you might assume that…
amillikan | December 27, 2008Scientists have long been torn about the exact evolution of birds since fossil and molecular dating techniques have yielded different answers. But by studying the DNA of birds in the parrot and cockatoo families, which do not migrate like most other birds, researchers were able to discern the times of species divergence and concluded that "parrots are an ancient lineage without any close evolutionary relationships," according to ScienceBlogger Grrl Scientist.
tlambert | December 22, 2008As well as his work on guns, John Lott has produced some bizarre claims about the Florida 2000 election. For example:
African-American Republicans who voted were 54 to 66 times more likely than the average African American to cast a non-voted ballot (either by not marking that race or voting for too many candidates). To put it another way: For every two additional black Republicans in the average precinct, there was one additional non-voted ballot. By comparison, it took an additional 125 African Americans (of any party affiliation) in the average precinct to produce the same result.
So 50%…
amillikan | December 21, 2008A group of economists and scientists are pointing to science to fix the "broken" American economy, positing that the crisis was caused by shortcomings in economic theory that scientific methods could potentially fix. But ScienceBlogger Jake Young is skeptical that this "Economic Manhattan Project" would be anything more than disastrous. "Why do we assume that scientists riding in like the cavalry will save the day?" he asks on Pure Pedantry.
amillikan | December 20, 2008Today on ScienceBlogs.com, you will notice a new feature on the site. Instead of The Buzz, we have an embedded video from Bloggingheads.tv. This feature will appear every Saturday and can be viewed subsequently here on Page 3.14, the editorial blog of ScienceBlogs.com. This week, John Horgan from the Stevens Center for Science Writings and George Johnson, author of Fire in the Mind and The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments discuss recent attempts of scientists to use functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging technology to display graphic images on a computer screen directly from the visual cortex…