society
clock | March 15, 20091985 talk by Terry Pratchett:
....One may look in vain for similar widespread evidence of wizards. In addition to the double handful of doubtful practitioners mentioned above, half of whom are more readily identifiable as alchemists or windbags, all I could come up with was some vaguely masonic cults, like the Horseman's Word in East Anglia. Not much for Gandalf in there.
Now you can take the view that of course this is the case, because if there is a dirty end of the stick then women will get it. Anything done by women is automatically downgraded. This is the view widely held -- well, widely…
clock | March 12, 2009Sorry, Nina, but I think I need to copy and paste the entire thing here:
Spring is here and it's time to talk to strangers. On Sunday April 5, I'll be conducting a collaborative experiment with 15 intrepid University of Washington graduate students, and I'd like to invite you to join in from your own hometown. April 5 is the first day of a class I'm teaching called Social Technology, in which we are focusing on designing an exhibition that features social objects, that is, exhibits or artifacts that inspire interpersonal dialogue.
To kick off the course, we're doing a simple exercise at the…
clock | March 12, 2009Joshua Davis wrote an amazing article for Wired - The Untold Story of the World's Biggest Diamond Heist - about the biggest successful bank robbery in history: how was it accomplished, why the perpetrators got caught in the end, and how come nobody still knows all the details (including the Big Question: where on Earth is all that loot today?). He interviews some of the key people in the story as well, with proper caveats about their trustworthiness. A masterful example of good journalism and a riveting read. The Obligatory Reading Of The Day.
clock | March 3, 2009John Conyers and Open Access:
Pushed by scientists everywhere, the NIH and other government agencies were increasingly exploring this obviously better model for spreading knowledge. Proprietary publishers, however, didn't like it. And so rather than competing in the traditional way, they've adopted the increasingly Washington way of competition -- they've gone to Congress to get a law to ban the business model they don't like. If H.R. 801 is passed, the government can't even experiment with supporting publishing models that assure that the people who have paid for the research can actually…
drorzel | February 28, 2009One of last year's physics majors is spending the year in rural Uganda working at a clinic/ school there. He's keeping a blog, which is intermittently updated by western standards, but remarkably up-to-date given where he is.
This week, he blogged about putting his physics education to use:
I have been doing a lot of electrical work the last two days. I connected a laboratory and rewired the whole system so that some safety switches would be in place and so that I would be the sole person with the knowledge and ability to decide who will have light. Actually, it is to break it up so that we…
clock | February 24, 2009Genetic Manipulation of Pest Species: Ecological and Social Challenges:
In the past 10 years major advances have been made in our ability to build transgenic pest strains that are conditionally sterile, harbor selfish genetic elements, and express anti-pathogen genes. Strategies are being developed that involve release into the environment of transgenic pest strains with such characteristics. These releases could provide more environmentally benign pest management and save endangered species, but steps must be taken to insure that this is the case and that there are no significant health or…
clock | February 24, 2009The very first, inaugural, and absolutely amazing edition of the Diversity in Science Carnival is now up on Urban Science Adventures. Wow! Just wow! Totally amazing stuff.
And what a reminder of my White privilege - a couple of names there are familiar to me, as I have read their papers before, never ever stopping to think who they were or how they looked like! What a wake-up call!
For instance, I have read several papers by Chana Akins, as she works on Japanese quail. And I am somewhat familiar (being a history buff and obsessive reader of literature in my and related fields) with the work…
drorzel | February 23, 2009Inspired by Leigh Butler at tor.com, I've been re-reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books. This happened to coincide with my recent vicious cold, which is good, because they're great sickbed reading.
Most of my re-reading has been done on my Palm, which miraculously came loaded with electronic copies of all the books. These are of, shall we say, variable quality, and riddled with typos, including one hilarious bit in which Rand is pursued by "Trollops." It's a little like reading the Wheel of Time as written by Matthew Yglesias.
As a result, the re-read is also serving as a nice reminder…
drorzel | February 22, 2009This week's Science Saturday on bloggingheads.tv features Carl Zimmer and Phil "Bad Astronomy" Plait:
It's a wide-ranging conversation, covering topics in astronomy, why people believe crazy things, how the Internet can help, and the death of newspapers and their eventual replacement by blogs. Plait is really energetic (he spends a couple of minutes talking over Zimmer without even noticing), making it a livelier-than-usual conversation.
I'm not sure I agree with him about newspapers, though. What he rattles off is more or less the standard triumphalist-blogger line-- newspapers are too slow…
drorzel | February 11, 2009Back in the fall, I got all caught up in the election, like everybody else, and I added a bunch of blogs to my RSS feeds in Google Reader. I'm thinking that I might need to cut back to pre-election levels, if not lower, though. Following too many political blogs is giving me whiplash.
This has really been brought home to me as the progress of the stimulus bill has coincided with a busy patch, meaning that I've been sitting down in the evening to 60-80 posts worth of stimulus bill commentary. Going through a whole day's worth of blog posts about the stimulus reads something like:
The bill's in…
clock | February 7, 2009I've been on Facebook since the beginning, in 2005. I explored it and studied it. I always spent minimal amount of time on it, though. I get e-mail notifications and perhaps once a day go there to click on all the "Ignore" buttons for all the invitations. So, I do not see is as a big time drain. But every now and then I get useful piece of information there, or an invitation to something I want to attend. I also use it to monitor what my kids are doing there. It is also nice to reconnect to some people I have not heard of in 20-30 years and see what they are doing.
I am on my third set of…
clock | February 7, 2009Who has power?
Elected officials: they write, vote for and sign laws, they decide how much money will be collected from whom and how it will be spent, they decide on starting and stopping wars, i.e., lives and deaths of people.
Who else has power?
Anyone who can affect the decision of an elected official, e.g., to change a vote from Yes to No or vice versa.
How does one do that?
By having money and using it wisely.
How does one use money to affect policy?
One: by directly lobbying the elected officials. Two: by buying off the media.
I understand how One works, but Two?
Elected officials…
pontiff | January 30, 2009Like many an arrogant kid before me, when I graduate from high school in my podunk hometown (no, it wasn't marshy, and I say podunk with all the warm feelings of a idyllic childhood), I was filled with confidence that I was one of the smartest people I knew. Oh, I'd never say it, and yes I knew I was good mostly at only one small thing, mathematics, but I'm pretty certain looking back that I was a pretty confident ass. As you can well imagine, then, transitioning from my high school to Caltech, an institution filled with near-perfect-SAT-scoring students, Nobel laureate faculty members, and a…
drorzel | January 27, 2009Via Kathryn Cramer (on Facebook, of all places), an article from the Daily Mail about how kids these days don't get around much:
When George Thomas was eight he walked everywhere.
It was 1926 and his parents were unable to afford the fare for a tram, let alone the cost of a bike and he regularly walked six miles to his favourite fishing haunt without adult supervision.
Fast forward to 2007 and Mr Thomas's eight-year-old great-grandson Edward enjoys none of that freedom.
He is driven the few minutes to school, is taken by car to a safe place to ride his bike and can roam no more than 300…
clock | January 25, 2009How many of you have been blogging since June 1997?
Not many, I think. But danah boyd has. And she's been studying online social networks almost as long, first starting with Friendster, then moving on to MySpace and Facebook as those appeared on the horizon and became popular.
Recently, danah defended her Dissertation on this topic and, a few days ago, posted the entire Dissertation online for everyone to download and read - Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics (pdf):
Abstract: As social network sites like MySpace and Facebook emerged, American teenagers began…
clock | January 25, 2009In our heads, of course. All of our heads.
But Seed is asking, so let me elaborate briefly.
As I said before, science is not just active participation in research. Science is a mindset.
We are all born scientists, exploring the world around us and experimenting with it. When we grow up, we continue being scientists in our day-to-day lives.
If you walk into a room and flip a switch and the light does not come on, what do you do? I doubt that you throw yourself on the floor in fear, speaking in tongues, praying, blaming the Aliens or asking the Government to help you. You calmly go about…
drorzel | January 25, 2009In his inaugural address, President Obama pledged to "restore science to its rightful place." Following up on that, the Corporate Masters have launched the Rightful Place Project, asking bloggers, readers, and scientists to define the rightful place of science.
Many of these responses will focus on narrow matters of policy, but as many have said with regard to the economic crisis, this is no time for timid measures. It's a time for big thoughts and bold action. With that in mind, here's my take on the question of science's rightful place, which, in the end, boils down to defining what science…
clock | January 24, 2009There is one paragraph in this Forbes article about America's Most Wired Cities that I really did not like:
North Carolina suffered the biggest drop, with Raleigh declining to No. 15 from No. 3 and Charlotte dropping to No. 20 from No. 7.
That is really bad news and we need to do something about it. And while the list only looks at big cities, getting wired is much easier to implement in smaller places, for instance, we can do it in Carrboro if we work on it together.
Then, with the example of small places to look at (and perhaps shamed by them), the big cities will follow.
drorzel | January 23, 2009The Physics and Astronomy colloquium this week was by Jill Linz from Skidmore, talking about a couple of physics outreach programs she's worked on. This being right up my alley, I made it a point to get in early enough to see the colloquium (I spent the morning at home with the sick SteelyKid, and Kate was good enough to come home for the afternoon), before giving an exam in the afternoon.
Linz took a somewhat different approach to physics outreach than a lot of other projects, which tend to focus on high-school students taking physics. She pointed out that if you look at the full student…
clock | January 22, 2009This is the question that Seed is asking:
Restoring science to its rightful place in government and in society will be no simple task: it will demand fresh ideas, the engagement of America's scientists and engineers, the re-engagement of the public, and the collaboration of other cultural and social communities. It will not happen overnight, but we will witness in 2009 a U-turn back to the future. History will call this the birth of our scientific renaissance.
And you are all encouraged to respond, in any format you like:
Seed and SEEDMAGAZINE.COM have invited responses to the question from…