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cortex | December 11, 2008In the latest New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell has a thought-provoking article on the difficulty of figuring out what sort of person is best suited for a particular job. He begins by discussing the challenge of choosing college quarterbacks, a topic that I've written about a few times before (and cover at length in my forthcoming book):
All quarterbacks drafted into the pros are required to take an I.Q. test--the Wonderlic Personnel Test. The theory behind the test is that the pro game is so much more cognitively demanding than the college game that high intelligence should be a good predictor of…
gregladen | December 11, 2008Check this out. It is the US Civil War re-enacted as an exchange of facebook twittery-thingies. HT BATC.
pharyngula | December 10, 2008Mike Huckabee is a smug little hypocrite who tries to defend his opposition to gay marriage by arguing that a) it's traditional (never mind that marriage has changed greatly since biblical times), b) it's natural and necessary for procreation (ignoring the fact that a childless marriage is still regarded as a marriage), and c) that you can't redefine the magic word "marriage" (yeah, like language never evolves). Jon Stewart makes him squirm over his position.
This wretched ignoramus will be running for president again in 2012, you know it. I know I'll be struggling to suppress nausea when he…
gregladen | December 10, 2008
Linnaeus' Legacy No. 14: A Carnival of Diversity
Encephalon 60, A Neuroscience Blog Carnival
Hourglass VI: A carnival of biogerontology
Grand Rounds 5:12 - Healthcare Reform Q&A
Carnival of Homeschooling #154: Anniversary Gifts
Christmas Recipes Carnival of the Recipes
Carnival of Cinema: A Smorgasbord!
Carnival of Politics Edition #21
93rd Make It From Scratch Carnival
The December Oekologie will be hosted HERE by yours truly. I've already got an excellent selection of entries, but there is still time to send in yours if you hvae not already. What is Oekology? "Oekologie is a…
grrlscientist | December 10, 2008Today's collection of carnivalia have been published for you to enjoy.
Encephalon, issue 60. This is the second time I've hosted this carnival, which is devoted to collecting all reports on neuroscience into one place for you to read and enjoy.
Linnaeus' Legacy, a blog carnival that focuses on reports about the world's biodiversity.
Carnival of Education, issue 201. This blog carnival, predictably, focuses on essays about education and teaching.
Carnival of the Conservatives, where my essay was out-numbered by a tremendous number of conservatives. Well, at least my submission was included…
jwilbanks | December 10, 2008From the Independent:
A respected research institute wanted Chinese classical texts to adorn its journal, something beautiful and elegant, to illustrate a special report on China. Instead, it got a racy flyer extolling the lusty details of stripping housewives in a brothel.
Let me be the first to make the joke that I'm all for "open access" but this is a bit much...nyuk nyuk nyuk...
gregladen | December 10, 2008As you read this, Amanda and I our our celebrating our Anniversary! (Of when I asked her to marry me.) I know it is a little extreme to celebrate such a thing, but we don't get out much.
gregladen | December 10, 2008REPOST
I hope these stories are not related to each other...
Great beasts peppered from space
There is fairly convincing evidence that the explosion of an object not of this earth hit mammoths and other Pleistocene Mega Beasts with shrapnel up in Siberia and Alaska.
Boeing's 12,000lb chemical laser set to fry targets from aircraft
Earthlings have finally developed an effective, large scale, and portable Ray Gun.
Global group aims to return Martian soil to Earth
There is a plan to go to Mars and bring back some dirt. Who knows what is going to be in that dirt?
Who Speaks for Earth? ...…
mspringer | December 10, 2008A mysterious gap in posting? Must be finals time! As of now I'm done. We'll see how they went. One of them went well for sure, the other sort of depends. My own students are having their own exams as well, and I've got my fingers crossed for them.
One of the things that's going to be on the exam (or at least it in a chapter they covered) is the speeds of molecules in a gas. Like people milling around in a crowd, as the molecules fly around and bump into each other they'll be exchanging energy and moving at different speeds. Some molecules will have just been hit in just the right way…
cortex | December 10, 2008Sine-Wave speech is a wonderful example of the importance of patterns when it comes to our sense of sound. When people first hear a sentence that's been artificially degraded, the sentence sounds like a sequence of "simultaneous whistles, or science fiction sounds." However, when people are first played the undistorted sentence - they've been given the perceptual pattern in advance - they are able to easily interpret the garbled noises. Click here for an elegant example of the phenomenon.
In my book, Proust Was A Neuroscientist, I use this search for patterns - the brain is a pattern-making…
cortex | December 10, 2008The pathetic behavior of the Illinois governor - his brazen attempt to sell a Senate seat - raises the larger question of power and corruption, and whether having a position of power reliably leads to unethical behavior. (My first thought, upon hearing that Blagojevich had been recorded by the Feds, was that even the lowliest corner boys on the Barksdale crew were smart enough to not say incriminating stuff over the phone.) Here's some suggestive evidence from Richard Conniff, writing in the Times:
Researchers led by the psychologist Dacher Keltner took groups of three ordinary volunteers and…
cwilcox | December 10, 2008Mind Control. Body-Snatchers. They sound like they're straight out of a science fiction novel, but the truth is parasites have been ahead of us in manipulatory technology for eons. They're the best of the best at making another species bend to their will. Here are some examples of some science facts that sound like they belong in science fiction - all courtesy of your everyday parasite.
So, since I already have a weekly does of cute, I figure I'll balance it out with a weekly dose of something that's about as far from cute as I can find - a really awesome parasite.
The most familiar example…
gregladen | December 9, 2008The Japanese Education, Science and Technology Ministry have issued a recall notice for 5,500 cell phone straps that contain the radioactive substance tritium.
The straps, not surprisingly marketed as "glow in the dark cell phone straps" had been on sale since the beginning of the year, although not with widespread distribution. The Hiroshima couple making the straps was arrested primarily for selling the straps without a license, ....
I will refrain from all the obvious things that could be said at this point....
source
grrlscientist | December 9, 2008Here's more blog carnivals that are hot off the presses for you to read!
Carnival of Economics, 9 December 2008 edition. This is a huge blog carnival, featuring a variety of essays about the economy, alhtough most of them discuss various aspects of the current economic disaster that Bush and his buddies have proudly overseen.
Carnival of Homeschooling, issue 154: anniversary gifts. I know that some of you are offended by this blog carnival, but if you are, I encourage you to go to the specific entries that offend you and argue with the authors about the errors in their logic (certainly,…
sb admin | December 9, 2008In case yesterdayâs post didnât convince you to get a flu shot, you should check out Maryn McKenna at Superbug's report on the growing problem of deadly staphylococcus infections hitting flu sufferers. She highlights the sad case of Robert Sweitzer, a 39-year-old man who was healthy until he came down with the flu â and then died of MRSA pneumonia while waiting in the emergency room. (MRSA, or methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, is a particularly troublesome strain of staph, because it's resistant to the antibiotics generally used to treat it.)
In October, McKenna wrote a CIDRAP…