society
drorzel | June 8, 2009Somebody recently asked me whether I had figured out who Female Science Professor is. I truthfully replied that I haven't even tried.
That was the first thing that came to mind when some jerk from the National Review revealed the identity of "Publius", kicking off another round of discussion about the etiquette of revealing identities that bloggers have chosen to conceal. This one probably won't be any more revealing than the previous go-rounds.
It's worth a tiny bit of effort, though, to fight for correct language in this case. Lots of people, most of them right-wingers, will be referring to…
drorzel | June 5, 2009This may be too late in the day to generate much action, but I thought of it just a little while ago. Two questions:
1) If you were writing a letter of recommendation for a student, would you refer to them as "Firstname" or "Mr./Ms. Lastname"?
2) Does your answer depend on the level of the student? That is, would you refer to an undergraduate the same way as a graduate student?
I've seen both, and have a definite opinion on the subject, but I'm curious as to what people think.
clock | June 4, 2009As you may have noticed if you saw this or you follow me on Twitter/FriendFeed/Facebook, I spent half of Tuesday and all of Wednesday at the XXVI International Association of Science Parks World Conference on Science & Technology Parks in Raleigh. The meeting was actually longer (starting on Sunday and ending today), but I was part of a team and we divided up our online coverage the best we could do.
Christopher Perrien assembled a team (including his son) to present (and represent) Science In The Triangle, the new local initiative. They manned a booth at which they not only showcased…
clock | June 1, 2009About a week ago, Nicholas Kristof wrote an eye-opening op-ed in NYTimes - After Wars, Mass Rapes Persist. In Liberia, and probably in some other places, the end of war does not automatically mean the end of rape:
Of course, children are raped everywhere, but what is happening in Liberia is different. The war seems to have shattered norms and trained some men to think that when they want sex, they need simply to overpower a girl. Or at school, girls sometimes find that to get good grades, they must have sex with their teachers.
The war, and the use of rape as a weapon of war, changes the…
clock | May 16, 2009Radical Transparency removes almost all potentials for conflict. Why?
Conflict requires secrecy by some people (bad guys), which is why neither utopian nor anti-utopian novels try to describe such a society in which everything done by everyone - individual, corporation, government - is completely transparent. When everything is out in the open, conflict is difficult to do.
It is hard to write a gripping novel without conflict. Who will read a lyrical ode to a perfect society? Readers need good guys beating up on bad guys in the Final Battle.
In many dystopias, transparency is one-way, i.e…
drorzel | May 15, 2009Malcolm Gladwell has a number of public responses to the sort of thing I ranted about the other day-- not to me specifically, mind, but to the same general points-- on his own blog and on ESPN's Page 2. It's pretty much the same argument others made in the comments to my post. Taking a fairly representative bit from his blog post:
The press is not for everyone. But then the piece never claimed that it was. I simply pointed out that insurgent strategies (substituting effort for ability and challenging conventions) represent one of David's only chances of competing successfully against Goliath…
clock | May 13, 2009You may have heard about a recent Wikipedia hoax:
A WIKIPEDIA hoax by a 22-year-old Dublin student resulted in a fake quote being published in newspaper obituaries around the world.
The quote was attributed to French composer Maurice Jarre who died at the end of March.
It was posted on the online encyclopedia shortly after his death and later appeared in obituaries published in the Guardian, the London Independent, on the BBC Music Magazine website and in Indian and Australian newspapers
Yup. Journalists check their sources carefully. Especially the despised untrustworthy Wikipedia, only a…
drorzel | May 13, 2009I'm currently the president of the local chapter of Sigma Xi (an honor society, not a fraternity, thankyouverymuch), and as such have been collecting RSVP's and dues for this year's new inductees. As part of this process, I've been struck by how many students don't have checks-- I've had a couple of students give me cash, one cashier's check from a local bank, a couple of checks drawn on parental accounts, and one check from the roommate of a nominee.
The first couple, I wrote off as individual eccentricities, but after a few more, and a little thought, I realized that this pattern is…
drorzel | May 5, 2009I'm never quite sure what to make of Malcolm Gladwell. Lots of smart people seem to be favorably impressed by his writing and ideas, but whenever I actually read anything by him, there doesn't seem to be much there.
Take, for example, this New Yorker piece on basketball as a metaphor for innovation. As seems to be his general practice, Gladwell frames the whole thing around an engaging anecdote, about Vivek Ranadivé, a Silicon Valley businessman who coached his daughter's team of twelve-year-old girls in a National Junior Basketball competition:
Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and…
pontiff | May 1, 2009In his latest New York Times op-ed column, David Brooks, the conservative liberals can most stomach, attempts to tackle the problem of "what makes a genius". This is, of course, the kind of reasonable length topic that one can explain in a single newspaper column (it's the New York Times, you now.) The article begins, like all great op-ed, with a strawman that would make Dorothy proud:
Some people live in romantic ages. They tend to believe that genius is the product of a divine spark. They believe that there have been, throughout the ages, certain paragons of greatness -- Dante, Mozart,…
clock | April 21, 2009The UCLA Pro-Test is tomorrow. If you live there - go. If not, prepare yourself for inevitable discussions - online and offline - by getting informed. And my fellow science bloggers have certainly provided plenty of food for thought on the issue of use of animals in research.
First, you have to read Janet Stemwedel's ongoing series (5 parts so far, but more are coming) about the potential for dialogue between the two (or more) sides:
Impediments to dialogue about animal research (part 1).:
Now, maybe it's the case that everyone who cares at all has staked out a position on the use of animals…
clock | April 19, 2009
I know it's been a couple of months now since the ScienceOnline'09 and I have reviewed only a couple of sessions I myself attended and did not do the others. I don't know if I will ever make it to reviewing them one by one, but other people's reviews on them are under the fold here. For my previous reviews of individual sessions, see this, this, this, this and this.
What I'd like to do today is pick up on a vibe I felt throughout the meeting. And that is the question of Power. The word has a number of dictionary meanings, but they are all related. I'll try to relate them here and hope you…
pontiff | April 18, 2009Over at Healthy Algorithms, the healthy theoretical computer scientist, puts up a very interesting graph about spatial variation in Medicare expenditures in the last six months of life. Paper here. Interesting stuff, but am I the only one who gaffs when reading: "Previous studies have shown that regions with greater overall EOL spending do not have better outcomes" (EOL = end of life)?
drorzel | April 14, 2009Over the weekend on FriendFeed, Paul Buchheit posed an interesting question:
Assume that I'm going to get rid of $20,000 and my only concern is the "common good". Which of these is the best use of the money: give it to the Gates foundation, buy a hybrid car, invest it in a promising startup, invest it in the S&P500, give it to the US government, give it to a school, other?
A lot of the discussion consists of tedious (and non-specific) banging on about the wonders of start-ups, but there's some good stuff in there if you have the patience to read through it.
Buried in there with…
pontiff | April 12, 2009
Can quantum computers efficiently compute factorials?
BaconCamp?
Day Took Er Silicon Valley Jrbs?
I wonder how I'd do on a RQ test?
clock | April 7, 2009In TIME, a couple of days ago - How Obama Is Using the Science of Change:
Two weeks before Election Day, Barack Obama's campaign was mobilizing millions of supporters; it was a bit late to start rewriting get-out-the-vote (GOTV) scripts. "BUT, BUT, BUT," deputy field director Mike Moffo wrote to Obama's GOTV operatives nationwide, "What if I told you a world-famous team of genius scientists, psychologists and economists wrote down the best techniques for GOTV scripting?!?! Would you be interested in at least taking a look? Of course you would!!"
Moffo then passed along guidelines and a sample…
drorzel | April 3, 2009In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, we instituted a complicated emergency alert system, involving sirens, loudspeakers, text messages, and emails. The whole thing gets tested far more frequently than it really needs to-- every few weeks, we get a barrage of emails warning us that a test is coming up, then another barrage of emails and text messages on the day of the test.
The system has been used exactly once, and it was a fiasco. A year or so ago, we got a flurry of messages telling us that there had been a shooting a couple of blocks from campus. These directed everyone to a web…
drorzel | March 28, 2009Twenty-five-ish years ago, my father and I went on a fishing trip in the Florida Keys with a very dear friend of the family, who had been going their for years. I've written about him before, because he had a severe case of polio shortly before Salk's vaccine was developed, and needed a good deal of medical equipment to survive.
As you might imagine, flying with Martin required a lot of red tape, even in those idyllic pre-9/11 days-- he needed assistance in boarding, oxygen available on the plane, some medical supplies in the carry-on, and all of this stuff needed to be cleared with the…
clock | March 25, 2009I first posted this on June 24, 2004 on the www.jregrassroots.org forums, then republished on August 23, 2004 on Science And Politics, then a couple of times on this blog.
Why did I decide to re-post it today?
Because I have been thinking and reading about the current state and potential future of journalism, including science journalism, and writing (still in my head) a post about it. So, I am forcing myself to go through my evolution of thinking about the topic, digging through my categories on the Media, Science Reporting, Blogging, Open Science, onlin Technology, etc. and this essay was…
drorzel | March 22, 2009My computer is starting to run slow in that way that indicates that either Microsoft has released an important update, or it's just been on too long without a reboot. Either way, I need to clear some browser tabs before restarting, and there are a bunch of articles that I thought were too interesting to put in a links dump, but where I don't quite have a clear enough opinion to write a blog post. These split into two rough groups, both of which are concerned with definitions.
One bunch of posts has to do with the recent poll about science knowledge, showing that a majority of Americans are…