society
clock | September 2, 2008In Business Week:
That is why isolating people in organizational silos is one of the biggest obstacles to innovation. Companies that are serious about innovation do everything possible to break down silos and encourage communication and collaboration across the organization and beyond.
But read the rest of the article as well. Sound familiar to any of you?
clock | August 26, 2008Judge Rules That Content Owners Must Consider Fair Use Before Sending Takedowns:
A judge's ruling today is a major victory for free speech and fair use on the Internet, and will help protect everyone who creates content for the Web. In Lenz v. Universal (aka the "dancing baby" case), Judge Jeremy Fogel held that content owners must consider fair use before sending takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA").
clock | August 25, 2008
[Comic strip taken from Unshelved]
The anti-technology curmudgeons are back. Not just worrying about technology in classrooms (for which Dave has a great response), but culture in general.
Nice to see a couple of good responses to the doom-and-gloom crowd.
First we: DIGITAL_NATIVES by Jonathan Imme:
There used to be a time when we would be called 'nerds' or 'techies'. Strange people with a near-obsessive compulsion to embrace new technology, and who'd rather communicate with their friends online than offline. People for whom the Internet itself was the ultimate source of information for…
clock | August 25, 2008It is so nice teaching biology to adults when there are no (obvious) Creationists in the classroom. It does not always happen that way - I have had a couple of cases in the past - but this time it was really nice as I could freely cover all topics deeply within an evolutionary framework (not always seen in my public notes, though, as I try to gauge the class first and then decide how overtly to talk ebout everything in evolutionary terms). It is always a conundrum. If there is a potential resentment of my lectures, I have to thread carefully. I have to remember that I am not trying to…
clock | August 24, 2008You know I am excited about Carrboro Creative Coworking. Looking at the pricing list which was released today, I think there will be a place for me there I can afford....
clock | August 22, 2008Watch what Clay Shirky said at Web 2.0 Expo SF 2008 (transcript here):
The quote that everyone likes, for a good reason, is the following:
I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her…
clock | August 22, 200812 New Rules of Working You Should Embrace Today. As you know, point #4 is one of my pet peeves:
4. People don't have to be in an office. This is the one I wish most businesses would get, right now, right away. It's so obvious once you get away from the traditional mindset. Traditionally, people worked in offices (and of course most still do). They go into the office, do their work, go to meeting, process paperwork, chat around the watercooler, clock out and go home.
These days, more and more, that's not necessary. With mobile computing, the cloud, online apps and collaborative processes,…
drorzel | August 21, 2008The recent news about the Amethyst Initiative, in which a number of college and university presidents are calling for a lowering of the drinking age from 21, has sparked a bunch of discussion. Jake Young and Mark Kleiman have good contributions.
There are two main arguments against lowering the drinking age:
1) Raising the drinking age to 21 led to a decrease in drunk-driving fatalities
2) Lowering the age to 18 would mean a rampant increase in high school drunkenness, as there are a fair number of 18-year-old high school students.
Just in the interests of being provocative, let me throw…
clock | August 19, 2008Yup, I've been hearing about this Amethyst Initiative about lowering the drinking age from 21 to 18 and wondered if I should blog about it from my perspective. Then I saw that Jake wrote a good post about it (and also see his older post on the topic and good comments by his readers) and decided to chime in.
I grew up in a country with no drinking age laws at all. When I was very young, perhaps as young as five, one of my regular chores was to go to the corner shop to buy things like bread, milk, yoghurt or whatever else was needed. Sometimes that meant I would get some beer or wine or…
drorzel | August 19, 2008Via a comment to an earlier post, here's an example of a journalist doing science right: NPR's Sarah Varney looks at "cleansing" foot pads, and finds them wanting.
She took a set of the pads, tried them out, and then brought used and new pads to a laboratory at Berkeley, where chemists studied the composition to see if the greyish black goo on the pad contained heavy metal toxins, as the ads claim. They didn't.
Then she tested an alternative hypothesis, that moisture and warmth cause the color change, by holding a clean pad over a pot of hot water. The pad turned black.
What she did wouldn't…
clock | August 18, 2008Save the planet? Buy it:
Millionaires are purchasing entire ecosystems around the world and turning them into conservation areas. Their goal? To stop environmental catastrophe.
But will they know how to do it well? Will they inject some of their own incorrect ideas into their projects? Who will they listen to when designing these? Will their kids continue?
drorzel | August 18, 2008Via Alex, WNYC's Radiolab podcast features a wonderful commencement address by Robert Krulwich to the Caltech class of 2008, making the case for the importance of telling stories about science to the general public.
This fits in wonderfully with what I said last week about science popularization. He comes at it from a different angle (and make an explicit connection to the evolution/ creationism debate, which I was avoiding), but it's the same basic argument.
And, as a bonus, he has a good NPR voice, suitable for helping get a slightly fussy infant to go to sleep...
clock | August 15, 2008Why Rage? Because Henry inspired me (though Mrs.Gee made him edit out the 'excessive' language). Why 2.0? Because I am all gung-ho about everything 2.0. So there!
So, like Henry, I will now proceed to rage about something....
Hotels
I've been traveling a lot lately, often staying in some very top-of-the-line hotels around the USA and Europe. Lovely hotels. Very comfortable. Very clean. Great service. Good food. Lots of cool amenities. More and more environmentally friendly. Nothing really to complain about. And I certainly do not want to single out Millennium UN Plaza hotel just…
clock | August 15, 2008From The National Humanities Center:
The National Humanities Center will host the third and final conference on "The Human & The Humanities," November 13 - 15, 2008, once again attracting scientists and humanities scholars to discuss how developments in science are challenging traditional notions of "the human." Events will begin on the evening of November 13 with a lecture from noted neurologist and author Oliver Sacks at the William and Ida Friday Center in Chapel Hill, NC.
This event is free, but guests must register in advance to guarantee seating.
Other speakers and special guests…
drorzel | August 15, 2008We live in a difficult era for satire. It's not that there's a shortage of targets deserving a humorous skewering, but the obvious candidates are so quick to dive headlong into self-parody, as with this recent gem from the anti-sex movement:
It's been linked in all sorts of places, but I think Matt Yglesias has it about right: "If anything, characterizing the sex-engineering link in this manner seems overwhelmingly more likely to reduce interest in engineering than to reduce interest in sex."
clock | August 14, 2008One of the cool perks of being a scienceblogger and going to a meetup this year was the opportunity to go and see the Horse Exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and to recieve (as we were not allowed to take pictures in there) a CD with some of the pictures. You can also see a lot more text and pictures, pretty closely following what is on the exhibit itself, on the excellent Horse Exhibit wesbite.
So, on Saturday afternoon, after the Meet-the-Readers event, several of us got on the subway and went up to the Museum. And I was not disappointed. You know I love…
clock | August 14, 2008I've been saving this picture for more than a year, not showing it to anyone or posting it anywhere online, not wanting to break the embargo:
This was a picture I took of one of the fossils brought to SciFoo'07 by Paul Sereno and Gabrielle Lyon, together with the skull of Nigersaurus.
Apparently, while digging for dinosaurs in Niger, Paul and the crew discovered an enormous and fascinating archaeological site - Gobero. They teamed up with anthropologists and archaeologists and spent two digging seasons analysing the site. The first results of this study are now finally published in my…
clock | August 13, 2008Robert Bruce Thompson is the author of Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments, a book I have and like, but cannot really use as it is hard to get the chemicals. Thompson now writes a guest popst on MAKE blog: Home science under attack
The Worcester Telegram & Gazette reports that Victor Deeb, a retired chemist who lives in Marlboro, has finally been allowed to return to his Fremont Street home, after Massachusetts authorities spent three days ransacking his basement lab and making off with its contents.
Deeb is not accused of making methamphetamine or other illegal drugs. He's…
drorzel | August 13, 2008You may be wondering whether the recent spate of blogging about science in popular media and peer review (by the way, you should definitely read Janet's two posts on these issues) has any connection to my talk next month at the Science in the 21st Century workshop. Yes, yes it does-- I figure that I'm going to be getting so little sleep in the next few weeks that I need as much of a head start as I can manage. Of course, this also means that I will continue to go on and on about this topic for a little while yet...
The thing that I think is most critical here is to recognize that the poor…
drorzel | August 11, 2008Lest you think I'm transforming the entire site into cute-baby-pictures-dot-com, let me reassure you that while the posting frequency may drop off a bit, Uncertain Principles will always be your go-to site for slightly ranty blogging about issues of science and larger culture. Well, one of them, anyway.
This is brought to you by a recent post at Physics and Physicists, in which ZapperZ takes issue with the New York Times. The Times wrote a silly piece on radioactive granite countertops a while back, which the Health Physics Society responded to, prompting ZapperZ to write:
When will these…