Science
drorzel | August 6, 2009(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Raymond Wagner, an engineer and technical fellow for a defense contractor.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
Chief Engineer for an initiative to enable users of a system-of-systems to concurrently train or…
drorzel | August 6, 2009(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of David Syzdek, a wildlife biologist.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I work as a wildlife biologist for a large water utility in a Western state.
2) What is your science background?
BS in Environmental…
awild | August 5, 2009Doesn't "bigote" mean "moustache" in Spanish?
Why, yes. It does.
Pheidole bigote Longino 2009
Chiapas, Mexico
The inimitable Jack Longino published a taxonomic paper today on the Central American Pheidole, including descriptions of some 23 new species. Among these is the marvelously moustached P. bigote. The function of the fantastic facial hair remains unknown.
source: Longino, J. T. 2009. Additions to the taxonomy of New World Pheidole (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Zootaxa 2181: 1-90.Â
drorzel | August 5, 2009(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Cush Copeland, a high-school science teacher.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I teach high school science in a public school in Central Florida. Over twenty years, I have taught mostly earth/space science (…
bioephemera | August 5, 2009The Bipartisan Policy Center's Science for Policy Project, co-chaired by former Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY), past chair of the House Science Committee, and Donald Kennedy, former editor of Science, and directed by David Goldston, former chief of staff of the House Science Committee, released its report today.
The report focuses on the need to draw clean distinctions between science issues and policy issues:
"The fundamental theme of the report is that the Administration needs to put in place procedures to try to distinguish science questions from policy questions," said Boehlert. "Often,…
bioephemera | August 5, 2009So on my return to regular Scienceblogging, I see that Mike the Mad Biologist and Razib are taking exception to a point made by Megan McArdle in the Atlantic. McArdle observes that the heritability of weight is quite high - almost as high as the heritability of height:
Twin studies and adoptive studies show that the overwhelming determinant of your weight is not your willpower; it's your genes. The heritability of weight is between .75 and .85. The heritability of height is between .9 and .95. And the older you are, the more heritable weight is.
Okay: how you take that statement depends…
drorzel | August 5, 2009(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Lucy Rogers, a writer in the UK.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I have managed to combine my interest in all things space with parts of my portfolio career. For example, I am the author of the book 'It's…
pharyngula | August 4, 2009
We miss something important when we just look at the genome as a string of nucleotides with scattered bits that will get translated into proteins — we miss the fact that the genome is a dynamically modified and expressed sequence, with patterns of activity in the living cell that are not readily discerned in a simple series of As, Ts, Gs, and Cs. What we can't see very well are gene regulatory networks (GRNs), the interlinked sets of genes that are regulated in a coordinated fashion in cells and tissues.
What this means is that if you look within a specific cell type at a specific gene, its…
pontiff | August 4, 2009Chris Mooney, former Scienceblogger and provocateur extraordinaire, will be in Seattle this Thursday talking about the book he co-authored with Sheril Kirshenbaum, "Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future." Details:
Thursday, August 6 7:00 PM
University Bookstore
4326 University Way N.E.
Seattle, WA 98105
http://www.bookstore.washington.edu/trade.taf?dept=attribute&category=events&par=trade&ttl=events&page=1
From all I've heard Chris is an excellent speaker so this should be a fun event.
awild | August 4, 2009Here's an image for the textbooks:
Ants, like butterflies, pass through egg, larva, and pupa phases on their way to adulthood. While in Florida earlier in this summer I found a nest of the twig ant Pseudomyrmex gracilis with brood present in all stages, providing the material to make these images.
The key was placing the developing ants on a glass slide. This provided distance between them and the cardboard background, so that the backdrop is blurred while the insects remain in sharp focus. These images are not what I'd call fine art, but I'm happy with them as solid illustrations of ant…
drorzel | August 4, 2009The Worldcon program has been posted, but only as a giant, confusing PDF. I was getting cross-eyed trying to figure things out, so I ended up creating my own blank grid sheets, and making notes on those.
The following is a by-no-means comprehensive list of things I think look interesting enough to attend. There are only a handful of thing that I'll definitely be at (I'll mark those in bold), but I'll probably choose many of the rest from this list:
Thursday
15:30: Re-reading
Graham Sleight, Jo Walton, Kate
Nepveu, Larry Niven
There is a school of thought that re-reading
is a juvenile habit,…
bioephemera | August 4, 2009
Check out this clever riff on vintage science books by Nate Wragg, one of a group of Pixar illustrators who teamed up to create the forthcoming Ancient Book of Sex and Science. Wragg says,
A favorite series of mine is "The How and Why Wonder Books." These were informational books that would focus on a certain subject or form of science per book. As I looked over the entire series, I thought to myself, "There is no sex and science issue." This gave me the perfect excuse to create my own volume for the series. The end result is the long lost "Sex and Science" edition that was never published.…
jrosenhouse | August 3, 2009Sometimes, when you're reading, you come across a paragraph so well-crafted and eloquent that you just have to pause in admiration. Here's an example, taken from the book Higher Superstition by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt. Published in 1994, it deals with some of the astonishingly foolish things certain humanities professors had been writing about science. The reference in the present paragraph is to sociologist Stanley Aranowitz.
Now, the uncertainty principle is undoubtedly one of the cornerstones of quantum mechanics and one of the most philosophically provocative developments in the…
oracknows | August 3, 2009Due to annoying stuff at work and good stuff personally, I didn't have time to grind out my usual bit of Insolence, either Respectful or not-so-Respectful, today. Fortunately, there is a long history on this blog, full of good stuff that I can repost. So, as I did when I went to TAM7, I'm picking a couple of posts for today that originally appeared in August. This one happens to have first appeared in August 2006; so if you haven't been reading at least three years, it's new to you (and if you have, I hope you enjoy it a second time).
I'll be back tomorrow.
Via Pure Pedantry, I've become…
drorzel | August 3, 2009I'm a late addition to a Sunday panel at Worldcon:
Science Blogging - The New Science Journalism?
Touted as a new way of reaching the public, has science blogging matched its initial promise? Has it caused more problems than it solves?
Well? What do you all think?
drorzel | August 3, 2009Last weekend, I was talking with Ethan Zuckerman at a party, and we talked a little bit about the TED conferences and similar things. A few days later, there was an editorial in Nature suggesting that scientists could learn a lot from TED:
[P]erhaps the most critical key to success is the style of the talks. And here, those scientists wishing to inspire public audiences could take a few tips from the speakers in Oxford who addressed themes as various as biomimicry (Janine Benyus), the neuroscience of other people's rational and moral judgements (Rebecca Saxe) and supermassive black holes (…
oracknows | August 3, 2009Due to annoying stuff at work and good stuff personally, I didn't have time to grind out my usual bit of Insolence, either Respectful or not-so-Respectful, today. Fortunately, there is a long history on this blog, full of good stuff that I can repost. So, as I did when I went to TAM7, I'm picking a couple of posts for today that originally appeared in August. This one happens to have first appeared in August 2006; so if you haven't been reading at least three years, it's new to you (and if you have, I hope you enjoy it a second time).
I'll be back tomorrow.
I debated for a while about whether…
catdynamics | August 2, 2009A couple of years ago, during a cold snap in winter, I noticed my hands were getting acutely chapped, with cracking of the skin and bleeding.
I come from a cold climate, I had never had problems with cold weather before.
Ah well, thought I, getting old; too much time in California made me soft.
So, I made a point of wearing gloves or mittens, even when the temperature was barely below freezing. Hands still hurt when it got cold, but it helped.
However, later that winter, I was traveling to an even colder, windier, clime, and I noticed my hands were fine. It was as if I had discovered some…
grrlscientist | August 2, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
jrosenhouse | August 1, 2009In Part One of this review I focused on the broad themes of Mooney and Kirshenbaum's book. My general feeling is that their presentation of the state of play is simplistic in crucial ways and that their proposed solutions are impractical at best. Now I would like to zoom in specifically on the eighth chapter of the book. It is called, “Bruising Their Religion” and focuses especially on what M and K see as the doleful influence of the New Atheists.
Regrettably, I think they get a lot of important things wrong. Let us have a look.
They begin with a whitewashed version of the Webster…