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grrlscientist | March 26, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
The next edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is less than two weeks away and as usual, it is seeking submissions and hosts! Can you help by sending URLs for your own or others' well-written science, medicine, and nature blog essays to me or by volunteering to host this carnival on your blog?
Scientia Pro Publica is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, environment, nature and medical writing that has been published in…
gregladen | March 26, 2010Tonight's episode marks the one year anniversary of Skeptically Speaking the radio show and podcast.
Tune in tonight a discussion of The Great Pacific Garbage Patch with Mariam Goldstein!!!
Details here
cwilcox | March 26, 2010It seems this week is full of moving.
Ed Yong, my dear friend who convinced me to join Science Blogs, is moving up in the world and has moved Not Exactly Rocket Science over to Discover.Com!
Ed is an amazing writer and it's no shock that the big guys would take notice of him. I hope that all of you will check him out in his new home. I know I will miss his presence here!
Good Luck, Ed, and congrats!
gregladen | March 26, 2010[The speaker] said she will file a complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission over the way she was treated by the University of Ottawa.
In a column posted on the website Townhall.com, [she] said she hopes the "august" commission will find out whether the school has warned other speakers to watch their words the way she was warned this week.
Click here to read more about the poor treatment Ann Coulter is receiving from the evile Canadahoovians.
Oh, and Ann, you're a faggot. As it were.
gregladen | March 25, 2010I am very lucky to work with Seed/Scienceblogs editor and blog herder (no one is actually certain of her exact title)
Erin Johnson. Erin is the person we Sblings rely on to keep everything running smoothly, to manufacture our debates, I think she may be the person who writes several of the pseudonymous blogs that are no the network. Without Erin, this would be a very boring place.
But seriously, Erin, I do appreciate everything you do and I feel very strongly that Sb is very luck to have you.
Today is Erin's birthday. You can wish her happy birthday here.
edyong | March 25, 2010Er, yeah. Sorry. Hit a slight glitch. Big news TOMORROW (as in Friday 26th), probably in the early afternoon.
Look, it's not like I've discovered the Higgs Boson...
sastyk | March 25, 2010
I'm not the challenge queen - that title could go to her Crunchiness , with whom you can freeze your buns, change your menstrual supplies and do a host of other moderately sexualized activities for fun and ecological profit or to Chile, who is currently preoccupied with moving house but regularly gets folks using their sun ovens, eating more locally and moving more. In all these years, I've only done the one, my Independence Days Challenge, now in its third year.
But I feel it may be time to diversify - I've been mulling over other possible challenges for a bit, and finally one came to me…
pharyngula | March 25, 2010Tebow is an obnoxious hyper-religious football player. He recently had to take some kind of test with a group of other players, and this is what happened:
At the Scouting Combine, the Wonderlic exam is administered to players in groups. The 12-minute test is preceded by some brief instructions and comments from the person administering the test.
Per a league source, after the person administering the test to Tebow's group had finished, Tebow made a request that the players bow their heads in prayer before taking the 50-question exam.
Said one of the other players in response:Â "Shut…
kcollins | March 25, 2010
The USA Science and Engineering Festival pulls out the stops to get the word out about the festival! This time the Festival has recruited none other than...Albert Einstein to promote the festival at Brain Awareness Week at the National Museum of Health and Medicine. Einstein talked about exciting scientific principles and got students excited about the USA Science and Engineering Festival that is going to take place in Oct 2010.
About 800 students attended Brain Awareness Week activities at the National Museum of Health and Medicine over the course of the five-day program. Students were…
mspringer | March 25, 2010Somehow - and I don't know exactly how, you know how the internet is - I came across this odd but cute song by the ineffable Weird Al. It's an almost seven-minute(!) ode to the roadside attraction that is the titular biggest ball of twine. The twine ball actually exists, and lives in Darwin, Minnesota.
Oh! What on earth would make a man decide to do that kind of thing!
Oh! Windin' up twenty-one thousand, one hundred forty pounds of string!
...
You know, I bet if we unravelled that sucker,
It'd roll all the way down to Fargo, North Dakota
'Cause it's the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota…
cortex | March 25, 2010Pablo Picasso once declared that "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up."
The solution to Picasso's problem is startlingly simple, at least according to the psychologists Darya Zabelina and Michael Robinson of North Dakota State University: We just need to think like a little kid. In their recent paper, "Child's play: Facilitating the originality of creative output by a priming manipulation," the scientists took a large group of undergraduates and randomly assigned them to two different groups. The first group was given the following instructions:
"…
agelman | March 24, 2010Our story begins with this article by Sanjay Kaul and George Diamond:
The randomized controlled clinical trial is the gold standard scientific method for the evaluation of diagnostic and treatment interventions. Such trials are cited frequently as the authoritative foundation for evidence-based management policies. Nevertheless, they have a number of limitations that challenge the interpretation of the results. The strength of evidence is often judged by conventional tests that rely heavily on statistical significance. Less attention has been paid to the clinical significance or the practical…
agelman | March 24, 2010Deep in a long discussion, Phil writes, in evident frustration:
I don't like argument by innuendo. Say what you mean; how hard is it, for cryin' out loud?
Actually, it is hard! I've spent years trying to write directly, and I've often noticed that others have difficulty doing so. I always tell students to simply write what they did, in simple declarative sentences. (It can be choppy, that's fine: "I downloaded the data. I cleaned the data. I ran a regression" etc.) But it's really hard to do. As George Orwell put it, good prose is like a windowpane, but sometimes it needs a bit of…
ddobbs | March 24, 2010
How new, then, is bloggery? Should we think of it as a by-product of the modern means of communication and a sign of a time when newspapers seem doomed to obsolescence? It makes the most of technical innovationsâthe possibility of constant contact with virtual communities by means of web sites and the premium placed on brevity by platforms such as Twitter with its limit of 140 characters per message. Yet blog-like messaging can be found in many times and places long before the Internet.
Here, for example, is a recent post on The Superficial:
RadarOnline reports âtraditional marriageâ…
grrlscientist | March 23, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
The next edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is less than two weeks away and as usual, it is seeking submissions and hosts! Can you help by sending URLs for your own or others' well-written science, medicine, and nature blog essays to me or by volunteering to host this carnival on your blog?
Scientia Pro Publica is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, environment, nature and medical writing that has been published in…
tlambert | March 23, 2010I imagine that by now almost everyone on the planet with an email address has received at least one email from Nigeria offering you a handsome fee to help retrieve millions of dollars that have been tied up somehow, so the returns from this scam are likely declining. The scammers are now turning to romance scams, where they pretend to fall in love with their victim before defrauding them. Carmen has the details.
agelman | March 23, 2010Kent Holsinger sends along this statistics discussion from a climate scientist. I don't really feel like going into the details on this one, except to note that this appears to be a discussion between two physicists about statistics. The blog in question appears to be pretty influential, with about 70 comments on most of its entries. When it comes to blogging, I suppose it's good to have strong opinions even (especially?) when you don't know what you're talking about.
P.S. Just to look at this from the other direction: I know next to nothing about climate science, but at least I…
gregladen | March 23, 2010At 13 or 14 seconds in, Biden tells the President that this is "A big fucking deal."
It is.
dgmacarthur | March 23, 2010Earlier this month I wrote a post skewering a terrible opinion piece about personal genomics in the Sunday Times by Camilla Long. This was my conclusion:
If Long wishes to stay ignorant of her own genetic risks - just as she has managed to remain ignorant of the entire field of genetics, even while writing an op-ed piece about it - that should be her choice. But her criticism of others who choose to pursue a greater understanding of their own genetic risk is entirely, horrendously misplaced.
Dan Vorhaus from Genomics Law Report was equally disgusted by the piece. While we were unsuccessful…