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gregladen | June 29, 2010As you know, Oedepus Maximus, with the help of a handful of diligent women and men put all into one place the data needed to prove that the now infamous You're Not Helping blog was not in fact written by a woman and three men of possible ethnic diversity working out of the Midwestern US. Instead, it was written by one twenty something year old grad student named William working in Alabama. Supposedly. Anyway, what you may not know is that the YNH web site was taken down last night but still exists in various easily accessible fragments here. (Poke around in the updates and comments for…
cwilcox | June 29, 2010I've linked to all kinds of posts of this on Twitter, so I figured at this point I may as well just post it myself.
Prepare for heartbreak.
jwilbanks | June 29, 2010
An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research - coming from their brains - in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The problem with this approach is that the brains are not exposed, just the thoughts, and that the brains available have been those physically accessible, such as those at the local university. Thus, those desiring to gain new knowledge through the consumption of peer-reviewed brains have been…
cortex | June 29, 2010Ever since Pac Man, video games have obeyed a few basic principles: A player sits down in front of a screen and presses a few buttons with his or her thumbs. Perhaps there's a joystick involved, or maybe the index finger has to do some work, too. But the body is essentially still. The only moving parts are the eyes and the fingers.
The Wii changed everything. Unlike every other game console, the Wii controller isn't built around a confusing alphabet of buttons. Instead, Nintendo uses some nifty bluetooth technology to translate our body movements directly onto the screen. When we swing our…
sb admin | June 29, 2010Liz Borkowski writes: Mark Pendergrast wrote yesterday about how politics plays into the work of the EIS, and it's something that I kept noticing as I read Inside the Outbreaks. As he points out, my post last week highlighted the solution to the Reye's Syndrome puzzle - which was solved by Karen Starko, who's also one of the Book Club bloggers! - but didn't get into the larger issue: there can be a big difference between solving the puzzle and solving the problem. In yesterday's post, Mark writes:
Although Karen's and subsequent CDC studies clearly demonstrated that giving children aspirin…
jgoldman | June 28, 2010
Fellow primate enthusiast Eric M. Johnson celebrates the one year blogoversary of the Scienceblogs incarnation of The Primate Diaries, today. Go on over and say hello.
gregladen | June 28, 2010One year ago today, EMJ started PD. And, that blog has proven a valuable contribution to scienceblog.com.
thusspakezuska | June 28, 2010Jun. 28, 2010 10:45 PM ET
SB COMMUNITY DEEMS PSEUDONYMOUS SOCKPUPPETERS ACCEPTABLE TARGETS FOR MOCKERY, DERISION
Douchey McDoucherson, ScienceBlogs Writers
ANYWHERE (SB)
Scientists have recently discovered that popular bloggers can taunt and gloat over the downfall of unpopular bloggers, and bask in the warm glow of widespread support - but only if proper precautions are taken while engaging in this dangerous enterprise. Most of the relevant research was published in a leading online linguistics journal.
Noted meangirl, petulant whiner, and internet gadfly Zuskaids was quick to critcize the…
sb admin | June 28, 2010Mark Pendergrast writes: Thanks to commentators Liz Borkowski, Karen Starko, Steve Schoenbaum, and Mark Rosenberg for their thoughtful posts, though it appears that Mark Rosenberg's post got cut off after his first-paragraph query asking why anyone would go into the field of public health. I will wait to respond to his post once I see him answer his own question! In the meantime, there is much to talk about. I (Mark Pendergrast) will respond to parts of what Liz, Karen, and Steve wrote in order, along with other blogger comments.
Let me respond first to a blog comment from John Willis, who…
jchosy | June 28, 2010Try this quiz. Pick out the titles of actual published scientific articles versus ones generated by a mad-libs-style algorithm....
Post your scores for bragging rights.
In case you need some cheering up after being squashed by this test of your mental acumen, check out these cuties at ZooBorns...
cortex | June 28, 2010The intelligence test is badly named. The main problem is that we should be talking about intelligence tests in plural, so that the IQ test is merely one of the many measures we use to assess our innate mental skills.
Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of Howard Gardner, Robert Sternberg and others, the IQ test remains the singular test of individual cognitive ability. The mysterious entity that it measures - g, for general intelligence factor - is still seen as the dominant variable in determining the intellectual performance of our brain. (G was first coined, in 1904, by the…
gregladen | June 28, 2010Just one week to go, kids! I'm working my ass off on finishing touches, but the Skepchick Spaceship is mostly go for launch! I'm very much looking forward to seeing a bunch of you there. You're in for a fantastic weekend. ....
Click here
gregladen | June 28, 2010Yesterday: The famous Jason and Jodi Event on the Internet. Relive it here.
Today: The anniversary of freeDOS.
Tomorrow, the death of TH Huxley. Details here.
Funny how things happen in threes. I wonder why?
gregladen | June 27, 2010Just so you know, this post led to this meltdown.
And, for the record, as I say in my first comment on that blog post, it is incorrect, absurd, offensive, and stupid to suggest that I linked a name of an author to that blog. No such thing happened. William, the blogger of YNH, who previously claimed to be a group of three or four people from the upper midwest including one female who is actually a 23 year old graduate student in Alabama, is what we call in the business one sick puppy. Feel free to go to his confessional blog post and join others who are encouraging him to keep blogging.…
pharyngula | June 27, 2010We have achieved victory in the great beard debate, reaching the goal of £1500, and also the votes for beards have a dominating lead over no beard. The Trophy Wife™ is relieved.
We aren't quite finished, though — the poll will remain open for another week, and those sneaky bare-faced people might still pull together a bunch of votes and snatch victory from our grasp. Just in case, I'm mobilizing the Australian hordes with this awesome beard on the face of Ned Kelly.
Ferocious!
gregladen | June 27, 2010Or are they being pushed out, but blamed for it?
A blog post in on Womensenews.org, raises interesting issues.
One woman characterized in the post loved her job in IT while working in the Washington D.C. area. The work environment was diverse, she felt comfortable, productive, respected. Then..
... a move to a company in the Midwest changed that.
"I don't know if it was the company or the geography, but I could hear and feel the hostility," she said.
Jones said even if a woman had been a team leader on a project, when it came time to meet with a client, she would be relegated to a…
gregladen | June 27, 2010Only for white girls:
Funny or Die has this dumb-ass policy of not letting you embed. So, eventually, they'll catch me and the above video will disappear. If that happens, click here.
ddobbs | June 26, 2010
Many significant human pleasures are universal," Bloom writes. "But they are not biological adaptations. They are byproducts of mental systems that have evolved for other purposes." Evolutionary psychologists like Bloom are fond of explaining perplexing psychological attributes this way. These traits emerged, the argument goes, as accidental accompaniments to other traits that help us survive and reproduce.
via nytimes.com
Perhaps this is the adverse of depression as a spandrel.
Posted via email from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker