Science
drorzel | May 1, 2007I wrote yesterday's post about the undergraduate research study very quickly, basically just to note the existence of the survey. It's sparked some good discussion, though, and I'd like to take another post or two to expand on what I think it means.
Of course, the beneficial effect of undergraduate research seems almost obvious if you stop to think about it a bit. Undergraduate research works to attract students from all different backgrounds into science for a very simple reason: doing research is nothing at all like the typical science class.
OK, I can really only speak for physics, here,…
drorzel | April 30, 2007Kate was scheduled to argue a case Friday morning in Federal court in Manhattan, so we decided to make a weekend of it. I drove down after class on Friday, and we went to dinner with Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden on Friday night, and spent Saturday at the Met, getting some culture.
Kate's a big fan of stained glass, so whenever we're there, we make it a point to check out the Tiffany windows they have on display. This trip, there was the added bonus of a special exhibition of items from Louis Comfort Tiffany's country estate, which showed the extravagent results you get when an artist is…
oracknows | April 29, 2007Thanks to a reader commenting in yesterday's post, I've been made aware of a truly brilliant summation of creationism of both the young earth and intelligent design variety:
Exactly.
oracknows | April 27, 2007This is a bit science policy wonky, but here's some interesting news from Medical Writing, Editing & Grantsmanship:
My *favorite* new factoid from the NIH ... the oldest "new investigator" to date received his first R01 last year at age ... 82. You go, guy!
On the other hand, a nobel laureate was triaged.
As a low-level scientific peon (compared to any Nobel laureate, that is), I find it nice to know that occasionally even the gods of science have a bump in the road to funding. ("Triaged" means that the reviewers all agreed that the grant was in the lower 50-60% of all the grants…
catdynamics | April 26, 2007Finanicial Times story on Wolfowitz aide trying to take out references to climate change in World Bank report
via Brad deLong
Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the Iraq war, got passed up to be World Bank President
I wonder why family planning and climate change got "edited" by his deputy...
Read the whole thing, it is pretty disgusting.
"One of Paul Wolfowitz's two handpicked deputies, Juan José Daboub, tried to water down references to climate change in one of the World Bank's main environmental strategy papers..."
and
"He is already under fire for allegedly trying to remove…
oracknows | April 26, 2007On May 5 New York City will witness what will perhaps be the most unintentionally hilarious spectacle of two fundamentalists making utter fools of themselves:
MEDIA ADVISORY, April 26 /Christian Newswire/ -- After ABC ran a story in January about hundreds of atheists videotaping themselves blaspheming the Holy Spirit, best-selling author Ray Comfort contacted the network and offered to prove God's existence, absolutely, scientifically, without mentioning the Bible or faith. He and Kirk Cameron (co-hosts of an award-winning Christian TV program) challenged the two originators of the "…
pharyngula | April 26, 2007My little trip distracted me with the perfect timing to miss the amazing fair-use flare-up — I'm back just in time to catch the happy resolution. I guess I'll say something anyway, but I'll be brief.
The general question is whether blogs should be restrained from using figures and data published in scientific journals. My position is that we should use them — scientific information should be freely and widely disseminated, anything else is antithetical to the advancement of science. The only constraints I think are fair is that all material taken from a journal should be acknowledged and…
catdynamics | April 26, 2007Was NASA science funding redirected for party political purposes leading up to the 2004 or 2006 elections?
There is a slowly growing flap over White House political operatives giving briefings to government agencies on election vulnerabilities and how to move funding to boost some local candidates and hurt others.
TPM reports that "oddly" NASA was included in the briefings
This is interesting for two reasons: one is that more than one high level civil service staffer at NASA HQ was summarily dismissed and, in at least one case, escorted off-premises, during or immediately after meetings with…
catdynamics | April 26, 2007Shelley at Retrospectacle ran into a corporate tangle of moronicity
to cut a long story short, she used a figure from a paper in discussing the article, which seems to be clear "fair use", and got a lawyer letter from the publishers (Wiley).
Here is the original - with figure recreated from the data rather than cut'n'pasted (duh!)
A lot has been said alredy, this is really just to link in sympathy and point people at the flap.
My take on it is that Wiley are being morons. Shelley's article was clearly fair use, and recreating the plot from the data is trivial anyway.
There is probably some…
oracknows | April 25, 2007This is the sort of thing that really irritates me.
Shelley, over at Retrospectacle posted a rather nice analysis of a paper that appeared in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture entitled Natural volatile treatments increase free-radical scavenging capacity of strawberries and blackberries. She was skeptical about news reports and press releases about the article, and did an analysis that showed that the paper did not show quite what the press was representing it as showing. In her post, she used a figure from the paper under the "fair use" doctrine to illustrate her point, and…
oracknows | April 25, 2007A lot of readers (well, a couple, anyway) have been asking me about the recent article by Peter Duesberg in the most recent issue of Scientific American entitled Chromosomal Chaos and Cancer. I suppose it's because I'm not only a cancer surgeon (which in and of itself is not enough to qualify me to comment on this topic) but rather because I'm also a cancer researcher and a molecular biologist (which, I submit, does make me qualified to comment on this topic). Peter Duesberg, as you may know, is the controversial scientist who is perhaps the foremost advocate of the discredited hypothesis…
drorzel | April 25, 2007I have two labs on Tuesdays, which is even more exhausting than it sounds, so I went to be early last night. And woke up to find a whole new planet. You guys need to give me some warning about these things...
Anyway, the planet in question orbits a red dwarf star a mere 20 light years from Earth, has a mass of roughly five times that of Earth and an estimated radius half again Earth's (which would mean a bit more than double the surface gravity, for those planning to set SF stories there). It orbits its star in about 84 days, which seems pretty short, but is much slower then the previously…
pharyngula | April 24, 2007Phil Plait has the stats: it's 1.5 earth diameters, 5 times the mass, 2¼ Gs, and probably has a surface temperature between 0°C and 40°C. It's big, it could be wet, and it's only 20 light years away. You know what I'm thinking? It could be the Planet of the Squid.
Somebody get cracking on that transluminal drive.
oracknows | April 24, 2007Given all the verbiage (see the link list below) about dichloroacetate (DCA) that I've spewed into the blogosphere decrying the hijacking of a promising cancer therapy by conspiracy-mongers (it's the cancer cure "big pharma" is keeping from you because they can't make money on it) and opportunistic entrepreneurs like Jim Tassanno preying on the desperation of terminally ill cancer patients, I had thought that I would be taking a break on the topic for a while. But wouldn't you know it? My blogging colleague Abel at Terra Sigillata unearthed another fascinating article on the effects of this…
oracknows | April 24, 2007As I mentioned before, I was at the American Association for Cancer Research Meeting in Los Angeles last week. During the meeting, I happened to attend a plenary session talk by the Director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), Dr. John Niederhuber, whose topic was the rather dire NCI funding situation. I've written about this topic before, both in general, in terms of my personal experience "sweating to the NIH paylines," to lamenting at how we as biomedical researchers are in essence treated as freelance money sources for medical schools. Coupling Dr. Niederhuber's talk at the meeting…
catdynamics | April 23, 2007One hundred billion.
One hundred thousand million.
That is a lot, in most contexts. Astronomical even.
Apparently, if you ask nicely, know the right people, you can have it, in cash.
US dollars. Off budget, no questions asked, no supervision, no audits.
What could you do with that?
It is both a lot, and a little.
It is a little bit less than the combined gross worth of the two richest people on the planet.
So a single charity foundation, the very richest, might have that much money, soon.
It is a bit less than the current capitalization of google; but it is more than the gross domestic…
oracknows | April 23, 2007A while back, I posted about news reports that teachers in the U.K. were reluctant to teach about the Holocaust because of fears of offending the sensibilities of certain parts of the population. The subtext, of course, was that Muslims were the ones who would be offended. I lamented that such sensitivity might be causing teachers in the UK not to teach the Holocaust properly, much as sensitivity to the religious beliefs in the US lead to teachers not teaching evolution. I wasn't alone in making this connection. Both PZ and the Bad Astronomer made similar comments.
It turns out that perhaps I…
pharyngula | April 21, 2007Darksyde has just announced a few details about the science panels that will be held at the YearlyKos Convention. One relevant piece of information is that I'm the guy in charge of the science caucus, and I have to organize something. If Darksyde had ever seen my office, organization is not a word that would have come to mind…
Anyway, there was a science caucus at last year's convention, too, and it was a bit the-opposite-of-organized. We got together in a big room and started talking, and the conversations all converged on one issue: what the heck are we going to do about this gigantic…
oracknows | April 20, 2007I'm confused again about what appear to be mutually conflicting statements.
The Discovery Institute's favorite creationist neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor two months ago on Pharyngula:
Perhaps a fable (not a just-so story!) will illustrate. Imagine that you, P.Z., were a student in 1925. You would study Darwinism fairly intensively as a high school student, undergrad, and med student (it's a hypothetical!). In high school you'd read Hunter's 'A Civic Biology' (unless you lived in Dayton, Tennessee), which taught the Darwinian superiority of the Nordic races and the need to eliminate the lesser…
catdynamics | April 20, 2007The toxic pet food problem is not going away
There have been more recalls, possibly with new contaminants.
Also appears rice gluten as well as wheat gluten was affected.
There is also buzz that the FDA is concerned the poisoning was deliberate.
It is also clear that some of the contaminated feed stock was fed to animals that were then slaughtered for human consumption.
Also, apparently, at least one batch of gluten went to a factory that makes processed food for human consumption as well as pet food.
no quarter has some
as does itchmo - they have a story on corn gluten - oh crap. We just…