society
clock | November 26, 2008StoryCorps is declaring November 28, 2008 the first annual National Day of Listening:
This holiday season, ask the people around you about their lives -- it could be your grandmother, a teacher, or someone from the neighborhood. By listening to their stories, you will be telling them that they matter and they won't ever be forgotten. It may be the most meaningful time you spend this year.
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This Thanksgiving, StoryCorps asks you to start a new holiday tradition--set aside one hour on Friday, November 28th, to record a conversation with someone important to you. You can interview anyone…
clock | November 25, 2008Paul Sunstone: Why Bother to Promote A Healthy Attitude Towards Nudity?
On the other hand, there are at least two, broad reasons for somewhat caring how nudity is viewed (shameless pun intended). First, the notion that nudity is scandalous, immoral, and even dangerous contributes to all sorts of socio-political absurdities.
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Perhaps another reason we should be a little concerned about how nudity is thought of are the many studies that suggest a more healthy attitude towards nudity has profound benefits -- especially for women. Here are the results of just three…
clock | November 23, 2008Daniel Drezner: Public Intellectual 2.0:
".....The pessimism about public intellectuals is reflected in attitudes about how the rise of the Internet in general, and blogs in particular, affects intellectual output. Alan Wolfe claims that "the way we argue now has been shaped by cable news and Weblogs; it's all 'gotcha' commentary and attributions of bad faith. No emotion can be too angry and no exaggeration too incredible." David Frum complains that "the blogosphere takes on the scale and reality of an alternative world whose controversies and feuds are ... absorbing." David Brooks laments, "…
clock | November 22, 2008NYTimes:
Eliminating daylight time would thus accord with President-elect Barack Obama's stated goals of conserving resources, saving money, promoting energy security and reducing climate change.
Eugene Sandhu:
In order to conserve energy, President-elect Barak Obama should eliminate daylight saving time.
Boing Boing:
President-elect Obama wants to get rid of daylight saving time in the United States to conserve energy.
The game of broken telephones? Or lack of reading comprehension, or just wishful thinking? I though we were the Reality-Based Community.
More....
drorzel | November 20, 2008I flagged this Matt Yglesias post about post-mortem examinations of the financial crisis as something to respond to. Matt writes:
I was at an interesting discussion with an ideologically diverse group of people last night of the future of financial regulations. One thing that there was broad agreement on that hadn't really snapped into focus for me previously is the idea that doing rigorously precise forensic work on how to understand "what went wrong" and then design the rule that would have prevented this is neither necessary nor sufficient to improving things going further.
The basic…
drorzel | November 19, 2008I got a bunch of really good comments to yesterday's post about athletes and attitudes toward education. Unfortunately, yesterday was also a stay-at-home-with-SteelyKid day, and she spent a lot of time demanding to be held or otherwise catered to, so I didn't have a chance to respond. I'd like to correct that today by responding to the main threads of argument in those comments.
Taking these in no particular order, Moshe writes:
Not sure there is a serious argument here, athletes are different in so many ways, but I'll bite - here is another difference. Some students and athletes have their…
pontiff | November 18, 2008Observations on time.
One hour of exercise is much more important for my well being than one hour of sleep.
Why does the physics department at the University of Washington have a sundial on the building? I mean, yes it is very cool, but no there are not many opportunities to use it!
Michael Nielsen blogs about Malcolm Gladwell's new book Outliers: The Story of Success
and about the 10000 hour rule. Supposedly one needs 10000 hours of practice to truly master a subject. That's over a year in time! That's like seven years straight if I work four hours a day with no breaks. That doesn't…
clock | November 17, 2008The geriatric leaders of the government of Italy are making fools of themselves by trying to regulate bloggers, i.e., get them to register with the government, pay taxes, be liable for what they write, etc.:
The law's impact would turn all bloggers in Italy into potential outlaws. This could be great for their traffic, I realise, but hell on the business aspirations of an Italian web start-up, not to mention any tech company that wants to sell its blog-publishing software in Italy, or open a social network here. In addition to driving out potential tech jobs, the stifling of free speech also…
drorzel | November 16, 2008When I'm in the right mood, I'm a sucker for really awful sci-fi movies. For example, Saturday night I stayed up far too late to watch the end of the tv-movie version of The Andromeda Strain, based on the book by the prolific and recently deceased Luddite Fiction writer Michael Crichton. It's been twenty-plus years since I read the book, but I recall it being a whole lot better than this piece of garbage.
Crichton's original novel about a crack research team dealing with a disease of alien origin is remarkable for being somewhat understated. The action focusses on the scientists attempting to…
clock | November 13, 2008Will Richardson is noticing an addiction to paper and he looks at himself:
Now I don't know that I've ever thought of no paper as exciting, necessarily, but I continue to find myself more and more eschewing paper of just about any kind in my life. My newspaper/magazine intake is down to nearly zero, every note I take is stored somewhere in the cloud via my computer or iPhone, I rarely write checks, pay paper bills or even carry cash money any longer, and I swear I could live without a printer except for the times when someone demands a signed copy of something or other. (Admittedly, I still…
drorzel | November 3, 2008Kevin Drum is amused by a historical comparison:
THEN AND NOW....In 2004, everyone complained that John Kerry was an old-media plodder who didn't react quickly enough to conservative attacks. What a dunce! In 2008, everyone is praising Barack Obama for keeping his composure and not letting conservative attacks knock him off his message. What a cool customer!
It depends a little on which part of 2008 you're talking about, of course. If you troll through the recent archives of liberal political blogs, you won't have any trouble finding dozens of posts wailing and moaning about the fact that…
drorzel | November 2, 2008Via FriendFeed, an interesting analysis of Internet traffic at compete.com. They set out to test the assertion that the "Long Tail" of low-traffic sites account for more traffic than they used to, and found exactly the opposite-- the share of all pageviews for the top ten domains increased from 29% to 40% between 2001 and 2008.
What's really interesting is the reason why:
The driver of this Top Domain growth can be summed up in two words "social networks". If you were to remove MySpace and Facebook from consideration in 2006 (also removing their pageviews from the total) top domains would…
clock | October 28, 2008'Voter-Verifiable' Voting System Ensures Accuracy And Privacy:
Approximately two-thirds of Americans voting in the November Presidential election will cast their votes on paper ballots. How can voters be assured their votes are counted and kept private?
Victorian Manchester Home To First Youth Gangs:
A historian at the University of Liverpool has uncovered extensive archive material detailing the activities of the 'scuttlers' - one of Britain's earliest youth cults.
Youth From Poor Neighborhoods 4 Times More Likely To Attempt Suicide:
Youth in their late teens who live in poor neighbourhoods…
drorzel | October 26, 2008I tagged Ethan Zuckerman's post abpout video "windows" to other places in a links dump recently. The idea is to put big video screens and cameras in fast-food restaurants around the world, and provide virtual "windows" into other restaurants in other countries. In talking about the idea, Ethan threw out a great aside:
(If I were Cory Doctorow, say, I'd write a short story about the idea rather than wondering how to build it, where a group of kids in Brazil befriend another group in China that they meet randomly over the monitor. The keep returning to the restaurant at pre-agreed times, hoping…
clock | October 25, 2008There is an interesting post (and comment thread) on Kevin Kelly's blog about the exponential growth of available information. It is quite thought-provoking, but there are a couple of issues I have with it.
First issue is that Kevin took the old adage that "every answer leads to at least two new questions", perhaps tongue-in-cheek (I hope), as if it was true:
Yet the paradox of science is that every answer breeds at least two new questions. More answers, more questions. Telescopes and microscopes expanded not only what we knew, but what we didn't know. They allowed us to spy into our…
clock | October 25, 2008Peter Suber, James Love and Glyn Moody have already blogged about this, but we need to make sure this spreads far and wide:
The AAP and Copyright Alliance want to prod the next President of the US to tilt the unbalanced US copyright law further toward publishers. According to a letter the AAP sent to its members (thanks to James Love and Glyn Moody), the two organizations are trying to identify the positions "that will influence intellectual property policy", and will then "offer suggestions regarding appropriate candidates for these positions to both presidential campaigns."
But first they…
drorzel | October 24, 2008This week's department colloquium was Roel Snieder of the Colorado School of Mines on The Global Energy Challenge. I have to admit, I was somewhat rude, and spent a lot of the talk futzing with my tablet, but really, while his presentation of the material was very good, the material itself wasn't new to me-- if you read ScienceBlogs, you've probably heard it all.
It's a colossal ball of woe, too. You know the story-- demand for energy is increasing, supplies of oil are dwindling. The planet is warming, the ice caps are melting, the oceans are rising. Everything is on the verge of collapse.…
drorzel | October 24, 2008Chris Mooney visited Union on Wednesday, talking to two classes (one Environmental Studies class, and one class on presidential politics), and giving an evening lecture titled "Science Escape 2008." He's an excellent speaker, so if you're looking for someone to give a talk about science and politics, you could do a whole lot worse.
I enjoyed the evening talk quite a bit, in part because it echoed a lot of things I said in my talk at the Science21 meeting last month (video, live-blogging), thus reassuring me that I'm not a lone crank on these issues. He talked about his experience with…
drorzel | October 21, 2008Lots of people talk about "Science 2.0" and "crowdsourcing" and the like. EurekAlert provides a story about taking it to the next level:
Nalini Nadkarni of Evergreen State College currently advises a team of researchers who sport shaved heads, tattooed biceps and prison-issued garb rather than the lab coats and khakis typically worn by researchers. Why is Nadkarni's team composed of such apparently iconoclastic researchers? Because all of her researchers are inmates at Cedar Creek Corrections Center, a medium security prison in Littlerock, Washington.
With partial funding from the National…
clock | October 20, 2008This I first posted on June 24, 2004 on www.jregrassroots.org, then republished on August 23, 2004 on Science And Politics. I love re-posting this one every now and then, just to check how much the world has changed. What do you think? Was I too rosy-eyed? Prophetic?
In the beginning there were grunts, tom-tom drums, smoke signals, and the guy on the horse riding from village to village reading the latest King's Edict. That is Phase I in the evolution of media.
Phase II was ushered in by Gutenberg. Remember the beginning of Protestantism? Luther nailing copies of his pamhlet on the doors…