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agelman | November 5, 2009Slipperiness of the term "risk aversion"
Med School Interview Questions
How to think about how to think about causality
tqa | November 5, 2009
For reasons that are well known to the regular readers of this blog, I'm following the ongoing situation at Fort Hood closely right now. There's a lot of scattered information coming out right now, and absolutely no way to know how much - if any - of it is real. About all that is clear at this point is that a number of people have been killed and wounded.
It's undoubtedly going to be quite some time before the situation is going to be fully confirmed to be over. Fort Hood is the size - and has the population - of a fairly large city. It's going to take a lot of time to search through the…
ddobbs | November 5, 2009 Tell me that doesn't leave you wanting more. Ed Yong delivers:
Male bats create tents by biting leaves until they fall into shape. These provide shelter and double as harems, each housing several females who the male mates with. Fruit bat sex goes like this: the female approaches and sniffs the male, and both partners start to lick one another. The male makes approaches with his thumbs (like the Fonz) and mounts the female (like the Fonz). Sex itself is the typical rhythmic thrusting that we're used to, and afterwards, the male licks his own penis for several seconds.
But Tan also found…
gregladen | November 5, 2009Hurry up and sign this petition demanding health care reform with a public option!!!
Thank you very much. Al Franken thanks you as well.
gregladen | November 5, 2009Oh, and the Liberal Blogosphere has embraced the term "Obamacare" from here on out, OK?
And no, I don't have a link for the stories. I saw it on TV. That box that is not really the internet and does not have links.
jwilbanks | November 5, 2009I got a lot of feedback on my last post in which I argued that open source is the wrong metaphor fo science, because it ties us too closely to the artifact that is open source software. The core of my argument remains the same - science is not software, and we shouldn't treat it the way we treat software. But I got a few comments, here on the blog and in email, that are worth looking at.
Here's comment #1.
You cite openwetware and the biobricks registry, but if you look closer, openwetware is a wiki, not a website about open source wetware tech. To my knowledge, other than the people over at…
agelman | November 4, 2009Aleks sends along this amusing news article by Jennifer Levitz:
A new study found that rates of marriage outside the faith were sharply curbed among young Jews who have taken "birthright" trips to Israel . . . Over the past decade, Taglit-Birthright Israel, a U.S. nonprofit founded by Jewish businessmen, has sponsored nearly 225,000 young Jewish adults for free 10-day educational tours of Israel as a way to foster Jewish identity. . . .
A study [by Brandeis University researcher Leonard Saxe and partly funded by Taglit-Birthright] showed that 72% of those who went on the trip married within…
gregladen | November 4, 2009LOL: How do you photograph a bad day?
LOL: Unhelpful signs in Seattle
SRSLY: New rule: Bill Maher has to stop calling himself a "Rationalist" if...
WTF! Loose Tentacles Sink Ships
gregladen | November 4, 2009Here, at Observations of a Nerd!
This is an outstanding issue of an outstanding blog carnival. So what are you doing just standing there!!?!???? Go read it! Click on everything!!!11!!
cortex | November 4, 2009As a chronic insomniac, I'm always a little disturbed when I learn about the lingering cognitive effects of a bad night sleep:
In a study at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in 2003, for example, scientists examined the cognitive effects of a week of poor sleep, followed by three days of sleeping at least eight hours a night. The scientists found that the "recovery" sleep did not fully reverse declines in performance on a test of reaction times and other psychomotor tasks, especially for subjects who had been forced to sleep only three or five hours a night.
In a similar study in…
gregladen | November 4, 2009Science Online 10, or as I like to call it, S0t0, is shaping up to be quite the un-conference. Stephanie Zvan has organized a session called Trust and Critical Thinking, with herself PZ Myers, my favorite Radio Talk Show Host Desiree Schell, and Kirsten "Dr. Kiki" Sanford. Oh, and me.
Description: Lay audiences often lack the resources (access to studies, background knowledge of fields and methods) to evaluate the trustworthiness of scientific information as another scientist or a journalist might. Are there ways to usefully promote critical thinking about sources and presentation as we…
gregladen | November 4, 2009Paul Ingraham is Vancouver Registered Massage Therapist and science writer who criticizes questionable practices in alternative health care -- and his professional regulator calls it offensively unprofessional and wants to censor his website with tens of thousands of dollars in legal defense expenses at stake.
Science-based alternative health? Rebellion within the alt-health ranks? Juicy.
details here
dgmacarthur | November 4, 2009 Yesterday I posted a brief rant about the need for researchers to think about the best way to return genetic research data to participants, spinning off an equally brief opinion piece I wrote for the ongoing ELSI series at Genomics Law Report.
Today Dan Vorhaus has posted an excellent piece on the same topic over at GLR, triggered by an exchange between 23andMe's Anne Wojcicki and Kaiser Permanente. Go check it out.
Subscribe to Genetic Future. Follow Daniel on Twitter.
mspringer | November 4, 2009For most of human history, our ability to perceive and understand very fast optical events has been limited by the temporal resolution of the human eye. Things that happened too fast were a blur, and all we had to go on was guesswork. Take, for instance, this 1821 painting of a horse race:
If it looks a little bizarre, it's because it guesses wrong on the character of one of those very short events - in this case, the position of a horse's feet during a gallop. Not until the invention of high-speed photography later on in the 19th century could the gallop be better resolved and understood…
gregladen | November 4, 2009Wow, I had forgotten that Lieberman was Gore's running mate....
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
gregladen | November 4, 2009 Melisa Riviere Melisa Rivière, of Emetrece Productions, and close personal friend of this blogger, will give a lecture this Thursday at St. Thomas University as part of St. Thomas' s "Multicultural Student Services Fall Community Dialogue."
Melisa is co-founder of B-Girl Be and a PhD candidate and lecturer at the University of Minnesota.
Details:
Latina hip-hop audio-visual producer and scholar Melisa Rivière will discuss her research at a 6:30 to 8 p.m. program Thursday, Nov. 5, in Room 100 of McNeely Hall on the St. Paul campus of the University of St. Thomas.
Free and open to the…