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gregladen | June 5, 2010A couple of "missionary" posts back, I intimated that we got to stay at the missionary stations while visiting various cities or en route between points in return for our work giving out medicine and such at our research camp. In truth, the arrangement was a bit more complex and subtle than this, and in fact, I think the arrangement and its nature changed over time. The various missionary entities that existed in the Ituri Forest and nearby cites that would be used as jumping off points were actually hospitable to us for three reasons. 1) Almost everybody is almost always hospitable to…
cwilcox | June 5, 2010
"World Environment Day (WED) 2010 is aimed to be the biggest, most widely celebrated, global day for positive, environmental action.
Commemorated on 5 June since 1972, WED is one of the principal vehicles through which the UN stimulates worldwide awareness of the environment and encourages political attention and action.
Through WED, we are able to give a human face to environmental issues and enable people to realize not only their responsibility, but also their power to become agents for change in support of sustainable and equitable development.
WED is also a day for advocating…
gregladen | June 5, 2010Near the end of the earth there are lines one might not cross for fear of falling off.
OK, you won't really fall off, but you will become scared and lost.
This is a Repost in celebration of Missionary Weekend
The area of my research in the Ituri was, by many standards, one of those places near the end of the earth, with the lines that have consequences if you cross them. This region of Africa, with complex and important topography, was the last to be figured out by Western explorers and geographers. As recently as 1889, Europeans thought that the Semliki River flowed from the Rwenzori…
gregladen | June 4, 2010UN chief Ban Ki-Moon has called for an independent investigation in the Democratic Republic of Congo into the death of a human rights activist.
Floribert Chebeya's body was found in his car after he was called to a meeting with the national police chief, which did not take place, on Tuesday.
A senior UN investigator said the circumstances of the death "strongly suggested official responsibility".
source
gregladen | June 4, 2010Lately I've been reading the 19th and early 20th century traveler's accounts of what is now known as the Western Rift Valley and the Ituri Forest, Congo. Some are written by the famous 'explorers' such as H.M. Stanley, others written by scientists on expeditions in the area, and still others by missionaries. Reading these accounts puts me in mind of my own experiences, as a scientist working in that same area, with the missionaries that live and work, or sometimes just visit, there.
So, a few missionary stories are in order.
This is a Repost in celebration of Missionary Weekend
There were…
cortex | June 4, 2010Over at Slate, William Saletan has finished a wonderful series on the distortions and dishonesties of memory. Although our memories always feel true, they're extremely vulnerable to errant suggestions, clever manipulations and the old fashioned needs of storytelling. (The mind, it turns out, cares more about crafting a good narrative than staying close to the truth.) Needless to say, this research has profound implications for everything from eyewitness testimony to talk therapy.
After opening with a clever mass experiment - Slate doctored a few political photos, and then demonstrated that a…
gregladen | June 4, 2010Or, at least, it may not be "protected" speech.
Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia have submitted a brief to the Supreme Court in support of a father who sued anti-gay protesters over their demonstration at the 2006 funeral of his son, a Marine killed in Iraq.
source
Obviously we're talkin' Wesboro Baptist Church here. The Supremes will consider the case.
This is mixed news, because while it ma be good to limit insane over the top highly offensive crap and tell people like the Wesboro slobs to take their protest elsewhere, the basis of he brief is the sanctity of the funeral…
mikethemadbiologist | June 4, 2010For a while now, I've been arguing that when it comes to lending, caveat mutuor should be a guiding principle. After all, no one held a gun to these guys heads and said, "Make me a shitty loan now!" And these guys were supposed to know how to assess housing loan risk--it's what they do. Well, I would like to think people listen to me (although I'm sure I have nothing to do with it at all). But this NY Times article suggests that people are starting to do this:
A growing number of the people whose homes are in foreclosure are refusing to slink away in shame. They are fashioning a sort of…
jgoldman | June 4, 2010The first iteration of this post engendered quite a bit of discussion. Some of it within the scope of what I initially wrote about; much of it not.
I closed the comments and un-published the post while I considered what to do about it. I've decided to go ahead and re-publish the post, stripped of all editorializing. So what you have now is just description and explanation of the studies.
I had initially written:
Let's make a few things clear: I am not taking sides in the issue of whether or not pornography should be censored or restricted (but most forms of censorship make me very…
gregladen | June 3, 2010
Doesn't fit very well in our fixed 500px format. But, it's a funny cartoon and suggests that Dilbert is a skeptic.
Hat Tip: Hemant Mehta
cortex | June 3, 2010Jet lag is an annoyance of modern life for which our pleistocene brain is completely unprepared. This ability to zip around the globe, to trapeze from time zone to time zone, is an invention of the late 20th century. Unfortunately, the brain is an organ of routine, equipped with a stubborn circadian clock. We are wired to expect a 24 hour day, and when our day extends far beyond that, the result is a set of symptoms that remind us we are far from home.
The problem of jet lag is also an interesting case study of stress. Hans Selye, the great Canadian endocrinologist, defined stress as the…
cwilcox | June 3, 2010
The Kuli'ou'ou ridge trail is one of my favorites on Oahu. It's a 2.5 mile trek that ascends roughly 1700 ft to the top of the Ko'olau mountains which cut eastern Oahu in half. I've done this hike a number of times, and each time I'm amazed by the stunning views. So, of course, when we learned that camping permits were available for this ridge and its surrounding trail system, Barry and I simply couldn't resist.
We decided to take it easy on ourselves the first night. I stepped on the trail with 30 lbs of gear strapped to my back, so I was in no hurry to the top. About 1/2 way up, there is a…
cwilcox | June 2, 2010MIT's Science Fiction Society has a truly inspiring review of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight. Worth taking a quick look at.
sb admin | June 2, 2010As part of the series of posts reflecting on the move of Science Commons to Creative Commons HQ, I'm writing today on Open Data.
I was inspired to start the series with open data by the remarkable contribution, by GSK, to the public domain of more than 13,000 compounds known to be active against malaria. They were the first large corporation to implement the CC0 tool for making data into open data. CC0 is the culmination of years of work at Creative Commons, and the story's going to require at least two posts to tell...
Opening up data was a founding aspect of the Science Commons project at…
jwilbanks | June 2, 2010As part of the series of posts reflecting on the move of Science Commons to Creative Commons HQ, I'm writing today on Open Data.
I was inspired to start the series with open data by the remarkable contribution, by GSK, to the public domain of more than 13,000 compounds known to be active against malaria. They were the first large corporation to implement the CC0 tool for making data into open data. CC0 is the culmination of years of work at Creative Commons, and the story's going to require at least two posts to tell...
Opening up data was a founding aspect of the Science Commons project at…