Uncategorized
cortex | December 2, 2008Vaughan Bell, of Mindhacks fame, wrote a really interesting article on "post-bereavement ghosts" over at Mind Matters. I had no idea that such hallucinations were so ubiquitous:
Mourning seems to be a time when hallucinations are particularly common, to the point where feeling the presence of the deceased is the norm rather than the exception. One study, by the researcher Agneta Grimby at the University of Goteborg, found that over 80 percent of elderly people experience hallucinations associated with their dead partner one month after bereavement, as if their perception had yet to catch up…
grrlscientist | December 2, 2008
It's nice to know that a PhD in science is good for something .. what was your score?
pharyngula | December 2, 2008Don't be too disappointed — it's some weird blogger. At least he picked the best and most obvious scientist to represent Christmas.
mspringer | December 2, 2008If you go to Capital One's website and type in the appropriate login information, you'll see a "Welcome Matthew Springer" message and two accounts. One's a checking account and one's a money market account where I'm endeavoring to accumulate some savings. (I need to get that moved to a CD or something, the interest rate is awful). Just below those two accounts is a number representing the total amount of cash I possess. It obeys what you might call the financial analogue of the continuity equation:
This is the version you see in electrodynamics. It says that the flow of charge into or…
gregladen | December 1, 2008Seed Media Group, who brings you Scienceblogs.com and Seed Magazine, is ....
offering the chance to give the gift of science year-round. Donate a Seed magazine subscription to a science classroom and we'll give you the base subscription price of $14.95. You may donate one or more subscriptions to a school (or schools) of your choice, or, if you do not have a specific school in mind, DonorsChoose has selected schools that are most in need of these donations and will happily choose one for you.
Go HERE to donate a year's subsciption of Seed to your kid's school, your neighborhood school,…
jwilbanks | December 1, 2008If you have questions or comments you'd like to see the Digital Curation Centre tackle about Science Commons, here's your chance. Their next legal watch paper is on us.
For those of you who are interested in what I have to say, I'm keynoting their conference tomorrow in Edinburgh. My topic is "how radical sharing out-innovates traditional models" and it is already turning into a fun talk to write. I'll post slides to my slideshare afterwards.
sb admin | December 1, 2008Today is the 20th annual World AIDS Day, and World Health Organization Director-General Margaret Chan reflects on what the global community has achieved over the past two decades:
Civil society brought the disease â and the needs of those affected â to the forefront of world attention. Attitudes changed. Treatments were developed. Clinical schedules were streamlined and standardized. Funds were found. Prices dropped. Partnerships were formed, and presidents and prime ministers launched emergency plans.
The response to AIDS also reaffirmed some of the most important values and principles of…
grrlscientist | December 1, 2008Oh wow, more blog carnivals to educate and entertain you!
Carnival of Family Life, the Snowman Edition. This blog carnival features all sorts of family stuff, along with a bunch of snowcreatures, almost all of which are nearly identical humanoid snowblobs.
Movie Monday blog carnival, 1 December 2008 edition. Since this is the "movie going season" when the best films are released in preparation for the Oscars, this is a timely blog carnival for those of us who seek to spend our movie funds (and time) wisely.
Holiday Spirit blog carnival, 1 December 2008 edition. Filled with lots of holiday-…
cortex | December 1, 2008Now that the broken windows theory of crime has been experimentally validated - disorderly streets really do make people more likely to steal - Jason Kottke wonders if the theory also applies to online spaces:
Much of the tone of discourse online is governed by the level of moderation and to what extent people are encouraged to "own" their words. When forums, message boards, and blog comment threads with more than a handful of participants are unmoderated, bad behavior follows. The appearance of one troll encourages others. Undeleted hateful or ad hominem comments are an indication that that…
jwilbanks | December 1, 2008Deciding on the right license for an online community can be a touchy process.
Sometimes the community is focused on the organizing principles learned from software. Copyleft has been powerful in growing free software, and is regularly insisted on by online communities that build data, or community science content - not because it makes legal or technical sense for data or community science content, but because it's a security blanket known well from software.
The problem is that in a lot of cases, share-alike breaks the interoperability of data and content, in a way that it doesn't in…
gregladen | December 1, 2008
Carnival of Recipes: Holiday Gift Giving Edition 2
Change of Shift: November 27, 2008 Volume Three - Number Eleven
Carnival of Cinema: Episode 102 - Escape to Blog Mountain
the November 30, 2008 edition of Everything Worth Reading
>
grrlscientist | December 1, 2008
I receive a fair number of books to review each week, so I thought I should do what several magazines and other publications do; list those books that have arrived in my mailbox so you know that this is the pool of books from which I will be reading and reviewing on my blog.
Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do by Andrew Gelman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton; 2008) Brief Comment: Gelman and a group of fellow political scientists crunch numbers and draw graphs, arriving at a picture that refutes the influential one drawn by Thomas Frank, in What's…
cortex | December 1, 2008Cerebrum just published an interesting article on the ethical implications of using drugs to treat drug addiction. In particular, the scientists examine the benefits of naltrexone, an opioid receptor antagonist. (This means that the drug blocks receptors that normally bind opiates, like heroin. Methadone, in contrast, activates opioid receptors but appears to be an antagonist for NMDA receptors.) The scientists begin the article by discussing one of the few studies that actually investigated the benefits of naltrexone:
Despite not using opioids for a long period, incarcerated opioid addicts…
mspringer | December 1, 2008Well, my Thanksgiving posting break lasted longer than I thought. Real life is a more fun place than the internet though, and I hope you were having lots of fun and food and were not on the internet to notice my absence.
Among the things I did this Thanksgiving was watch Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog for the first time. It is, as you know, a thing of surpassing brilliance. It warrants a few posts about its unique self-financed studio-conglomerate-free creation, because that model would probably work well in other arenas of creativity, not the least of which is science. That I'll save for…
jwilbanks | December 1, 2008Hope all the Americans had a good holiday, and that the rest of the world finds peace in a troubled week. To my friends in India and Pakistan, to my colleagues at the Internet Governance Forum this week in Hyderabad...my thoughts are with you all.
Two quick links of much importance in my world:
1. Obama's transition site is under CC-BY.
Via Lessig's blog:
Consistent with the values of any "open government," and with his strong leadership on "free debates" from the very start, the Obama team has modified the copyright notice on change.gov to embrace the freest CC license.
Wow. Obama's team,…
cortex | December 1, 2008It's the best show on the radio* and it's all about science. If you're not listening to Radio Lab, then you're missing something quite special. The new season has just begun with a fantastic episode on "Choice," and I'm not saying it's fantastic just because it occasionally features my stammering voice. If you're curious what working memory has to do with chocolate cake, or why Oliver Sacks ate lamb kidneys for breakfast, or why you should never hand a stranger iced coffee, then you'll enjoy the show.
*Ok, maybe it's tied for first.
grrlscientist | November 30, 2008
I know that the holidays were originally celebrated by non-religious folk -- more commonly known as "godless heathens" by the religious wingnuts of all persuations in the crowd -- but our holidays were savagely stolen, repackaged and sold as religious consumer events devoted to orgiastic spending, so I'd like let you know that you are not stuck sending out schmaltzy religious holiday cards any longer. Now you can reclaim our holidays for what they were: time for celebrating the solstice and spending peaceful time with our loved ones, instead of spending money we don't have on trinkets that…
grrlscientist | November 30, 2008Here's the latest carnivalia for you to enjoy;
Everything Worth Reading, the "And Then There Were TEN" edition. Yes, they included something I wrote, which is not guaranteed, so I am happy about this, of course!
Health & Fitness Articles blog carnival, which is huge, filled with lots of articles for you to read.