Misc
apalazzo | April 8, 2008I've been too busy being a postdoc. Here's a passage I just listened to on my iPod. It made me think about our current crop of president-wannabes.
The only office of state which I ever held, O men of Athens, was that of senator: the tribe Antiochis, which is my tribe, had the presidency at the trial of the generals who had not taken up the bodies of the slain after the battle of Arginusae; and you proposed to try them in a body, contrary to law, as you all thought afterwards; but at the time I was the only one of the Prytanes who was opposed to the illegality, and I gave my vote against you…
stoat | April 8, 2008To the annual parish meeting. Thankfully I am no longer a parish councillor so am not obliged to go; but since a friend told me it was on I turned up. Of those who did, most were parish councillors, one was the district councillor, two were dogs walkers (I'll come on to that), two were my friend and me, and the remaining one was my friends daughter (who had done a very good hand-drawn childrens newspaper). [Update: oops, I forgot the sole stoic parishioner who turned up, and has turned up to every one for the last 20 years.]
Humour of the evening came from the county councillors report. The…
tlambert | April 8, 2008John Lott in his Fox news column claims:
During the 2000 election, with Bill Clinton as president, the economy was viewed through rose-colored glasses. According to polls, voters didn't realize that the country was in a recession.
Pgl has the graphs to show that the US was not in a recession in 2000.
Lott alos has:
Indeed, research has indicated that media bias is real. Kevin Hassett and I looked at 12,620 newspaper and wire service headlines from 1985 through 2004 for stories on the release of official government releasing numbers on the unemployment rate, number of people employed, gross…
apalazzo | April 6, 2008To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic.
- Matt Richtel in today's NYTimes
ejohnson | April 4, 2008Yep, you've seen these photos before on our channel pages- but have you seen them THIS BIG?
(Have a photo you'd like to send in? Email it to photos@scienceblogs.com, or assign the tag "sbhomepage" to one of your photos on Flickr. Note: be sure to assign your photo an "attribution only" or "share and share alike" Creative Commons license so that we can use it.)
First photo here, the rest below the fold.
Life Science. From Flickr, by JennyHuang
Physical Science. Arenal volcano in Costa Rica. From Flickr, by guano
Environment. An icy tunnel through New Zealand's Fox Glacier. From Flickr,…
ejohnson | April 4, 2008The latest issue of Seed features nine visionary thinkers whose work straddles the line between science and design. One is a "material ecologist" whose architectural designs, like a wax building skin that responds to wind and temperature, mimic natural materials. Another pair of graphic designers analyze massive amounts of data from seemingly mundane sources to create images that reveal unseen trends in addition to being visually striking. In the video below, the two designers—Joris Maltha and Daniel Gross—talk about their unique approach and why they are drawn to particular systems:
Videos…
ksharpe | April 1, 2008It's this week's top stories from our partner site, ScienceBlogs.de:
German Communications Prof Observes U.S. Elections
Miriam Meckel, Professor for Media and Communications Management at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, is touring the States on an Eisenhower Fellowship and sharing her insights into U.S. political campaigning on ScienceBlogs.de, on a guest blog called Amerikanische Begegnungen (American Encounters). Meckel has a ball watching Barack Obama dance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, while she finds that Chris Matthews, host of 'Hardball' on MSNBC, is no match for the…
apalazzo | April 1, 2008Well it looks like the top honchos at Seed Media Group wanted to diversify their little empire known as ScienceBlogs to include "other view points".
"Other" meaning pseudoscientific.
Here is some info on William A. Dembski from Wikipedia:
After completing graduate school in 1996, Dembski was unable to secure a university position; from then until 1999 he received what he calls "a standard academic salary" of $40,000 a year as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (CSC). "I was one of the early beneficiaries of Discovery largess", says…
vhughes | March 31, 2008This week, Jane of See Jane Compute considered the question: Is computer science really a science? She wrote:
The more I thought about it, the more I realized how complex this question really is...Computer science is in many respects a tool. It's a discipline that has its reach into many other disciplines. And that's one of the coolest, most interesting things about it. But that's also what makes it so hard to classify, to quantify.
Jane's further tackling the question in a series of posts. And we thought it would be a great question for this week's reader poll...so please weigh in!
Click…
apalazzo | March 29, 2008If I were you, I would add Juniorprof to your blogroll.
(I think it's time that I clean up my blogroll as well ...)
ejohnson | March 28, 2008If you like your cheeseburgers double and your redwoods giant, you may just like the large versions of this week's channel photos.
Several of the photos—those featured on the Life Science, Physical Science, Environment, Humanities & Social Science, and Technology channels—come from Felice Frankel and George M. Whitesides' new book, On the Surface of Things; you can read more about the inspiration behind these spectacular images in Page 3.14's interview with Felice Frankel here.
(Have a photo you'd like to send in? Email it to photos@scienceblogs.com, or assign the tag "sbhomepage" to…
apalazzo | March 26, 2008
We realy screwed up in so many ways. We created a mess. We lost any shred of credibility we ever had, we created terrorists, and even if we went into Iraq for the oil, we are so inept that we can't even get that job done properly. Yes we are too incompetent to even be greedy.
In the American mass media, there is all this talk about the military status of Iraq. What we forget is that having a functional society is so much more important. And nothing in Iraq is working. Not enough water, not enough electricity, not enough police. The streets are sewers. If that happened here, we would all go…
ksharpe | March 26, 2008These stories made headlines during the past week at our European partner site, ScienceBlogs.de.
GM Potato Goes to German Bundestag
Tobias Meier, who has posted before at his blog WeiterGen about his concerns regarding the EU procedures for authorizing genetically modified food, is amused to find that the German Parliament's FDP (Free Democratic Party) faction is now asking more or less the same questions. "Only just in my blog," he writes,
now in German Parliament... The German FDP party now questions the scientific basis of German ministers' ballot behaviour in EU boards, as exemplified by…
vhughes | March 24, 2008On March 19, the prolific British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke died at age 90. At his 90th birthday party, in December, Clarke made three wishes: for the world to embrace cleaner energy resources, for a lasting peace in his adopted home, Sri Lanka, and for evidence of extraterrestrial beings. So...Which of Clarke's three wishes do you think will happen first?
Click Here for PollOnline Surveys | Web Poll | Email MarketingView MicroPoll
Want to know the results? We'll publish them exclusively in next week's ScienceBlogs Weekly Recap—the fun e-newsletter that brings you the top…
ejohnson | March 21, 2008For your weekly viewing pleasure, here are the larger versions of this week's channel photos.
Several of the photos—those featured on the Life Science, Physical Science, Environment, Humanities & Social Science, and Technology channels—come from Felice Frankel and George M. Whitesides' new book, On the Surface of Things; you can read more about the inspiration behind these spectacular images in Page 3.14's interview with Felice Frankel here.
(Have a photo you'd like to send in? Email it to photos@scienceblogs.com, or assign the tag "sbhomepage" to one of your photos on Flickr. Note: be…
ksharpe | March 19, 2008Affirmative action for women professors, inaccurate science at the movies, education and privilege, and a YouTube vid not for the weak of stomach: it's this week's postcard from Europe.
Women-Only Science
The German Federal Ministry for Education and Research is opting for more female scientists. Two hundred women-only professorships are to be created, says Minister Annette Schavan, having observed that the current 11 percent of female professors is decidedly too low.
Tobias Maier at WeiterGen puts forward his view on why this very German form of affirmative action is beside the point:
"This…
apalazzo | March 16, 2008OK I've been silent too long. But with every political pundit I hear, with every column or blog post I read, I've become more and more upset. I'm distiurbed by all the frivolousness out there when it comes to politics and the current slate of candidates.
Seven and a half years ago, we suffered an unimaginable tragedy. Close to 3000 innocent people died, for what? Thousands more suffered, for what? Because a group of fanatical religious zealots had some point to make. We were angry, we needed to do something. Those lunatics were out of touch with reality. They were driven by some ideology that…
vhughes | March 14, 2008Today, March 14th (3.14, get it?), math geeks around the world are celebrating pi. Seed's NYC headquarters did, too, with--what else?--pie!