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grrlscientist | January 7, 2009tags: annual science communication conference, ScienceOnline'09, SciO09, Sigma Xi, Research Triangle Park, science blogging conference, nature blog writing
Okay everyone, you may be aware of the fact that I will be co-hosting a session about writing about nature on a blog at the upcoming ScienceOnline '09 conference in North Carolina. As you can tell from the official schedule, I and my colleague, Kevin Zelnio, will be hosting our session first thing on Sunday morning, 18 January 2008. Of course, my goal is to make this a useful and productive time for all of you, whether you attend in real…
grrlscientist | January 7, 2009Here's the latest Carnival of Education for your reading pleasure. To be honest, I am surprised, but pleased, that they included my submission!
sb admin | January 7, 2009Word is out that Obama will probably nominate Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon and television correspondent, for the post of U.S. Surgeon General. Reactions in my office yesterday werenât very positive, but several bloggers have pointed out that Guptaâs high profile and credibility with the general public can help him advance the administrationâs health priorities.
First, Revere helpfully reminds us what the Surgeon General actually does:
The SG is the head of the uniformed services of the United States Public Health Service, wears a Navy uniform and holds a rank equivalent to a Vice Admiral. If…
gregladen | January 7, 2009As you know, Senator Elect Barack Obama appears to have chosen neurosurgeon, former policy wonk, and CNN medical/health correspondent Sanjay Gupta to be surgeon general. There is an overwhelming display, on the science blogosphere, of diversity in opinion about this choice. My opinion: WTFC? He is not clearly unqualified, and the exact nature of the surgeon general position is poorly defined and ever changing. He is a communications guy, so maybe his thing will be about science communication. That would be interesting. The point is that every surgeon general has either picked up on a…
mspringer | January 7, 2009Reader Scott writes in with a good question that I've heard posed by several people in various places, because it really goes to the core of the counterintuitive nature of relativity.
Okay, let's assume I'm in a spacecraft moving at a speed of c-1 m/s. That's one m/s less than the speed of light. Would I be able to move from the back of the ship to the front at 1 m/s? Would I even be able to survive at that speed?
Here's my reply, extended a bit to include the relevant equations and go into a little more detail. The derivations will all wait until later:
Yes indeed. The question at issue is…
cortex | January 7, 2009A quick programming note: I'll be speaking at the Corcoran Gallery of Art next Monday, January 12. The lecture begins at 7 and, unfortunately, costs money. (I always get very insecure at the prospect of having people pay to hear me speak.) I'm currently in the process of developing my stump speech for the new book, but this will be my Proust powerpoint, in which I begin with umami and end with Girl Talk.
If you're a Frontal Cortex reader, please introduce yourself!
cortex | January 6, 2009Just a quick note to welcome back David Dobbs to the blogosphere. He's a fine, fine journalist and I'm thrilled that he's realized that long-form reportage can co-exist with blogging. I look forward to reading his future posts over at Neuron Culture.
Also, a quick endorsement that's long overdue: if you're looking for a way to celebrate the upcoming Darwin anniversary, I highly suggest Dobb's Reef Madness, which is a fascinating account of an important 19th century scientific paradox: where do coral reefs come from? The book is also a tale of empiricism and the scientific method, and you…
grrlscientist | January 6, 2009Here's a new blog carnival for you to read, this time, a new one for me (and possibly the last time this blog carnival will be published) -- the Fabulous! blog carnival, which is "all about appearances". Despite its hedonistic theme, there is a story there that is interesting; the "Stylish First Ladies" entry that you might find interesting and perhaps educational as well.
Here's a science-y blog carnival, Linnaeus' Legacy, for you to enjoy. This blog carnival is packed with all sorts of science-y goodness for you to learn from and enjoy.
And here's another great blog carnival, the Carnival…
mspringer | January 6, 2009Over at Uncertain Principles, Chad is talking football. There's this pesky problem of spotting the ball at the end of the play. In a game where fractions of an inch can make or break the end result, too often the issue is determined by a more or less random guess by the referee of where the ball stopped. Instant replay has helped the issue, but not come anywhere close to fixing it. It's too imprecise and often made less useful because there's enormous football players diving for the ball and thus obscuring it from the cameras.
There's good suggestions. DGPS, radar, optical tracking, and…
cortex | January 6, 2009Here's an interesting finding, which is summarized by Kevin Lewis in the Boston Globe Ideas section:
If you've ever had to take a test in a room with a lot of people, you may be able to relate to this study: The more people you're competing against, it turns out, the less motivated and competitive you are. Psychologists observed this pattern across several different situations. Students taking standardized tests in more crowded venues got lower scores. Students asked to complete a short general-knowledge test as fast as possible to win a prize if they were in the fastest 20 percent completed…
sb admin | January 6, 2009One of our favorite bloggers, BrooklynDodger, has returned to blogging after an extended break. Dodger is a scientific paper hawk, finding and commenting on important papers in journals we wish we had time to read.
We always learn something in Dodgerâs posts. Recently, for example, he had this (and more) to say about a new toxicology study on titanium dioxide nanoparticles:
Someday, the continuing myth that little to nothing is known about the hazards of nanoparticles or nanotechnology will be busted. The Dodgers(s) have previously noted that Titatanium Dioxide of all sizes is an IARC 2B…
chaoticutopia | January 5, 2009Well, here it is the first Monday in 2009, and judging by my inbox, which suddenly jumped to life, it is definitely time to get back to this poor site update. I was ready to dive in, anyhow, since the holidays are finally past, and my son returns to school tomorrow. (Yay!) Besides, tomorrow is Chaotic Utopia’s birthday--my first blog post was January 6, 2006. So, as a present to my blog, I’ll be giving it that much needed facelift. (I’ll admit, I was stymied by a few design choices, but I’ve finally moved past that and know what I want to do.)
In the meantime, check out this series of…
sb admin | January 5, 2009As the unemployment rate climbs, many of the newly unemployed are losing insurance coverage. Candice Choi of the Associated Press summarizes the options for replacing employer-sponsored health insurance: extending benefits for up to 18 months through COBRA; getting an individual policy; and, for those who qualify, getting coverage under a government program like Medicaid.Â
As weâve noted here before, securing an insurance policy on the individual market can be difficult and expensive â especially if youâre a woman. Medicaid eligibility varies from state to state. Childless adults generally…
cortex | January 5, 2009I just wanted to draw attention to two fantastic blog posts that describe a new paper by Edward Vul, a grad student at MIT, and colleagues at UCSD. The first post comes from Vaughan over at MindHacks:
I've just come across a bombshell of a paper that looked at numerous headline studies on the cognitive neuroscience of social interaction and found that many contained statistically impossible or spurious correlations between behaviour and brain activity.
Social cognitive neuroscience is a hot new area and many of the headline studies use fMRI brain imaging to look at how activity in the brain…
jwilbanks | January 5, 2009I've been working on some text for a series of papers lately. I'm writing the core of a book proposal and working through the ideas around the knowledge web and the knowledge economy, and thought I'd post some interim thoughts here.
Knowledge is a funny thing. Philosophers have spent eons debating it. I'm not going to figure it out here - in fact, the conclusion that I wasn't going to figure it out played a big role in my choosing not to go to graduate school. But on the web, we have these things that are kind-of-knowledge. Databases. Journal articles. Web pages. Ontologies.
Taken together…
grrlscientist | January 5, 2009The latest Carnivalia has been published for you to dig your teeth into.
Bobo Carnival of Politics is weird: the host spends a fair amount of space telling me that I am wrong about Bush being history's worst president by claiming that Bush will be recognized as one of the best presidents -- OMG. Seriously. Just like the religious wingnuts among us, this guy has an obvious fantasy life that overrides all reality and reason. Anyway, be sure to go over there and chew him a new one!
Movie Monday, issue 88. This blog carnival links to everything about film!
Europe Travel blog carnival, where they…
mspringer | January 5, 2009I was out of town (again) this past weekend, hence the posting shortage. Why in the world is it so much harder to find time to post during a nominal between-semester-break? I dunno, but it seems to be true. Free time doesn't scale the way you'd like.
One of the fundamental skill sets a physicist or really just about any scientist needs is to understand how quantities change scale. This is especially true when things change scale at different rates. I first noticed this particular instance of scaling phenomena while sitting in traffic in the city of Houston, Texas whose map (via Google)…