Science
oracknows | July 27, 2009Last week, I expressed my surprise and dismay that the Atheist Alliance International chose Bill Maher for the Richard Dawkins Award. I was dismayed because Maher has championed pseudoscience, including dangerous antivaccine nonsense, germ theory denialism complete with repeating myths about Louis Pasteur supposedly recanting on his deathbed, a href="http://oracknows.blogspot.com/2005/12/bill-maher-anti-vax-wingnut.html">hostility towards "Western medicine" and an affinity for "alternative medicine," a history of sympathy to HIV/AIDS denialists, and the activities of PETA through his…
jrosenhouse | July 26, 2009The science blogosphere has been buzzing about Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, the new book by former SciBlings Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum. For whatever reason everyone else seems to have received their review copies before I did, and I did not want to weigh in until I had read the book.
That has now happened, so I offer my review. There is too much to address in one post, so I will do three. In the first I will adress what I take to be the broad themes of the book. In the second I will specifically address Chapter Eight, which addresses…
grrlscientist | July 26, 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…
sporte | July 24, 2009I don't remember learning about plasma when I took physics, but it's amazing stuff. Last week at the Hi-Tec conference in Arizona, I got to learn how an electromagnetic field can be used to push plasma around a tube. Community college students get to play with the coolest toys!
Here's some plasma contained in a small area.
Figure 1. Plasma on the table.
Here's some plasma getting pushed around a tube.
Figure 2. Plasma getting pushed around.
Wikipedia has a very nice article on plasma and plasma displays that occur in nature, such as St. Elmo's fire. I guess if you want hands-on…
drorzel | July 24, 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 Dennis Lee, a researcher at a biotech company.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I'm the director of research for a small biotech company based in
Houston. We're developing a new device for high-throughput…
drorzel | July 24, 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 Pam Korda, a physicist working for a medical device company.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I am a "Lead Scientist" at an R&D subsidiary of a medical
devices company. In practice, this means I oversee a…
drorzel | July 24, 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 Denise Hills, a government geologist)
1) What is your non-academic job?
My job title is the very descriptive "Geologist II" which really tells you nothing about what I actually DO, now does it? I work for the…
drorzel | July 24, 2009Over at Dot Physics, Rhett wonders about the role of homework in a world that includes cramster:
Then what is the problem? The problem is with my jobs. Yes, jobs. I have two jobs. My first job is to help students learn. I am a learning-faciliator if you like. I do this in many different ways. One way is to assign homework. Oh, my other job is to evaluate how well students understand the material. I have to give them some grade at the end of the semester. One obvious way to do this is with an exam or feats of strength.
Here is the question: Do you grade homework? Oh, I know what everyone says…
razib | July 23, 2009The Economist has a review up of a book about Richard Dawkins' influence, The Selfish Genius: How Richard Dawkins Rewrote Darwin's Legacy. But it would really be nice to know who wrote something like this:
Her argument that the selfish-gene model is being superseded by other forms of evolutionary explanation relies on an overinterpretation of those alternatives.
In disputed areas of science perspective matters, and who someone is is a critical part of the information in judging their argument. I'm assuming this book review was written by someone who knows some evolutionary biology, in fact,…
drorzel | July 23, 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 Mike Sperry, who works for a planetarium company.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I am a Research Specialist/Scientist for Sky-Skan, a planetarium company. The company focus on everything from the software…
drorzel | July 23, 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 Sandra Ulbrich Almazan, who works as a scientist in the food industry.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I am an assistant scientist for an enzyme company. I work in the R&D department; I focus on finding…
bioephemera | July 23, 2009
"O.K., let's slowly lower in the grant money."
Todd Bearson
Arlington, Mass.
This cartoon in the latest New Yorker gave me a (cynical) guffaw this morning. Nice caption, Todd Bearson. . . do you work in science? ;)
drorzel | July 23, 2009I've had a few conversations with other small-college folks about how there ought to be some sort of group within DAMOP for people at small colleges, given how many of us there are who do AMO physics. Nothing has ever come of it, because nobody wants to take on the administrative hassle of organizing such a thing.
Fortunately for small-college theorists, they have some people who are more willing to step up, and have formed the Anacapa Society:
The Anacapa Society promotes research in all areas of theoretical and computational physics at primarily undergraduate institutions. The Society…
pontiff | July 22, 2009Two notes from Caltech of interest:
Michael L. Roukes' group at Caltech has produced a NEMS (nanoelectromechanical system) device which can (almost) measure the mass of a single molecule (as opposed to the many tens of thousands (is this the correct amount?) needed in mass spectrometry.) Build a 2 micrometer by 100 nanometer NEMS resonator. Drop a molecule on it. The frequency of vibration of the NEMS resonator changes. Detect this frequency change. Of course vibration frequency also depends on where the molecule lands. So run the experiment about 500 times to get good estimate of the…
drorzel | July 22, 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 Warman, a computer game system designer.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
Title: Game System Designer. Function: Computer Systems Generalist. I did not know such a job existed until it found me last…
drorzel | July 22, 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 Mark Hoddinott, a RF circuit designer.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I design radio frequency (RF) circuitry in wireless modems for a mid-sized company. The modem designs I work on use UMTS/HSPA/GPRS/EDGE…
drorzel | July 22, 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 Rod Charlton, a retired chemical engineer.)
I've been retired for about 5 yrs; perhaps my responses can
reflect some of my overall experiences during my career.... see below:
Also... in my last decade, my…
rallain | July 21, 2009Chad is posting some very useful stuff at Uncertain Principles. Basically, he has quite a few scientists that are not professors or such answering some questions. This is a great way for students to get a feel for what scientists actually do. If you don't subscribe to Chad's blog, you totally should. A great resource for physics stuff.
Here are the interviews he has. I am not sure what the P stands for in PNAS, but the NAS is probably Non-Academic Scientist.
If you are a high school or middle school student looking to do some type of report or presentation, this would be a great place to…
rallain | July 21, 2009This comes up everytime I teach physics for elementary education majors. The curriculum I use (Physics for Everyday Thinking - which is awesome) says that the colors in white light are ROYGBV (Red-Orange-Yellow-Green-Blue-Violet). Typically, I will get a student that says "Hey! What about indigo? Shouldn't it be ROYGBIV?" My first reaction to this was "huh?" Really, does it matter? Here is the spectrum you would see looking at a white light source.
You could break this into as many or as few colors as you like. So, it doesn't really matter. But this leads to a great question: Who…
sporte | July 21, 2009Liveblogging from the Hi-Tec conference
I'm currently at the Hi-Tec conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. (If you follow me on Twitter - www.twitter.com/@digitalbio - you may have seen me complaining about the temperature). It's an interesting conference, so I'm going to share some of the things that I'm learning.
Dr. Travis Benanti and Dr. Steve Fonash from Penn State University are presenting an interesting session this morning on nanotechnology.
Luckily, you don't have to know anything about nanotechnology to find the session fascinating.
If you're interested in learning about nanotechnology…