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pharyngula | October 24, 2008That's what Greg Laden says, and he wouldn't lie. If you're wondering what you can get her for her birthday, I'm sure she'd love it if you'd join the National Center for Science Education. It's much better than diamonds, and cheaper, too.
mspringer | October 24, 2008A space shuttle launch is pretty expensive. Exactly how expensive depends on who you ask, but if you divide the yearly cost of the program by the number of launches you get something in the neighborhood of half a billion dollars. That's actually pretty trivial by federal budget standards, but it's still not chump change. It's a measure of just how difficult it is to get to space. Let's try to put that number in perspective by running a few numbers describing the cost of energy. Think of it as a Fermi problem.
An orbiting shuttle has potential energy by virtue of its height above the…
cortex | October 24, 2008Over at Mind Matters, I've got an interview with Sheldon Solomon. We talk about fear, death, the fear of death, and politics. In this excerpt, Solomon describes an extremely clever experiment, in which he primed judges to think about death and then observed how this affected their judicial decisions:
LEHRER: How does this theory relate to mortality salience (MS)? And what's an experimental example of mortality salience at work?
SOLOMON: A large body of evidence shows that momentarily making death salient, typically by asking people to think about themselves dying, intensifies people's…
gregladen | October 23, 2008Happy Birthday Genie Scott!
Today is Genie Scott's birthday. Genie is loved by all in the community of biological scientists because of her central role, as director of the National Center for Science Education, in fighting the good fight against irrational efforts to teach creationism in our public schools and elsewhere. Genie is the author of several books, articles, and book chapters, including Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction and Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools.
I met Genie at a conference (SAA? APA? AAA? Don't remember). The link was…
cortex | October 23, 2008There's a new scientific appreciation for the importance of self-control. This trend began with Walter Mischel's astonishing marshmallow experiments, in which the ability of a four-year old to resist the temptation of a second marshmallow turned out to be a better predictor of future academic success than his or her IQ score. In other words, willpower trumped raw intelligence.
But what cortical muscles are behind self-control? An excellent Boston Globe article summarizes some current research and future projects:
Most recently, Yale University researchers found that delaying gratification…
cortex | October 23, 2008Apologies for the radio silence - I've been on vacation. This time, I actually tried to stay away from the internet while away. My online withdrawal period actually went though several distinct psychological stages. (And yes, I know such stages don't actually exist.) At first, I experienced a weird, existential anxiety - what if the world was about to end, or some cataclysm just occurred, and I didn't know about it? Shouldn't I peek at the Drudge? Then came acceptance: I was merely vacationing in the world circa 2002, before smartphones and twitter and online news alerts. I made it through…
jwilbanks | October 23, 2008I'm at a workshop on eChemistry today, and we were asked to prepare position statements. I'm not going to blog the conference - it's a private thing - but figured I would post my position statement here.
We were asked to answer some questions. I chose to answer this one: "do you assess the potential of new web-based communication models in Chemistry, i.e. their benefits or liabilities, their transformational power, and their chance of success?"
Full text is after the jump.
A good place to start is the transformation of scholarly communication from "using the internet" to "existing in…
sb admin | October 23, 2008by revere, cross-posted at Effect Measure
With the advent of flu season the perennial question of the "next pandemic" is again making an appearance, although I think it is more of a cameo appearance than a substantive one. WHO, CDC and numerous state health departments are warning citizens about seasonal flu, still a major public health problem, and the continuing threat of emergence of a novel flu virus to which the earth's population has little or no immunity. There is something both plaintive and formulaic about these warnings. Seasonal flu is with us every flu season (hence its name) and…
gregladen | October 23, 2008I'm putting up Four Stone Hearth Carnival later today: You have time to submit! Taking all anthropology posts.
HERE
cwilcox | October 22, 2008While it was often hypothesized in the 20th century that dinosaurs were the evolutionary ancestors of birds, it wasn't until the late 1980s that we found the first firm evidence of a dinosaur with feathers - specifically, quill knobs (which are strongly correlated with large and well-developed secondary feathers), like those recently found by Norell et al (2007) on an ulna of Velociraptor mongoliensis. But the question still remained as to why feathers evolved in the first place. Theories range from insulation to flight, and the answer is still hotly debated by paleontologists. While flight…
grrlscientist | October 22, 2008Unfortunately, my internet access situation is becoming more desperate, rather than less, so I am lucky to be able to write anything to you at all. Anyway, that said, here is today's carnivalia for you to enjoy;
Carnival of the Cities. As its name implies, this blog carnival focuses on cities -- whether you are talking about a city that you live in or you are talking about a city that you are visiting, this is the place to go to read about cities!
mspringer | October 22, 2008You know what irritates me? NCIS. Not the Navy's law enforcement agency, the TV show about that organization. I'm generally a fan of Law and Order style police procedurals, but that one just rubs me the wrong way. Why? The fetishize law breaking. Not the law breaking of the criminals they investigate, they themselves go out of their way to break the law. Need a DMV record? Hack their computers, don't bother to actually call and ask them or get a warrant. Suspect not talking? Give the Mossad officer on loan to NCIS fifteen minutes alone with the suspect. A relative accused of murder…
mspringer | October 21, 2008From the always good Ph.D. comics, we have this comic, which I saw pointed out at Pure Pedantry.
I'll defend this, a little. Football coaches are in large part responsible for the success or failure of a football team. In the grand scheme of things the position of a pigskin on a field is not exactly earth-shattering, but there's more too it than that. Football is popular. Tremendously, staggeringly popular. At LSU, my undergraduate university, every single home game saw 96,000 people in the stadium. Expensive merchandising with the LSU logo sells by the truckload with royalties going…
sb admin | October 21, 2008The Union of Concerned Scientists has just released a report on the media policies at federal agencies, in order to assess âthe degree of freedom with which science is communicated at federal agencies.â The nonprofit organization analyzed 15 regulatory and science agenciesâ policies governing communication with the media and the public, and then surveyed a cross-section of federal scientists to learn how the policies are implemented.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was the only agency to earn an âAâ grade from UCS for its policy (though its performance is rated âneeds…
cortex | October 21, 2008Richard Powers, one of my favorite novelists, just got his entire genome sequenced and wrote about the results for GQ:
I come from a long line of folks, on my mother's side, with congenital difficulty making choices. My father's family, on the other hand, are born snap deciders. This time the paternal genes won out, and half an hour after reading the invitation, I was on board.
So I went shopping. A day online gave me my first taste of the bewildering range of consumer genetic products. There was Family Tree DNA, specializing in tracing genetic genealogies. There was DNA Direct, whose Web…
mspringer | October 21, 2008Last Saturday I penned a snarky comment about the philosophy of science, and within a week I read something that's particularly interesting from that very perspective. Well, might as well use it when it has its uses. Some preliminary:
It is certainly either true or false that Julius Caesar's paternal grandfather sneezed on his tenth birthday. Can we figure out which using science? Let's review what has to be available in order to do science. While there's always debate at the margins as to what constitutes science, virtually any working scientist will tell you that the main issue is…
cwilcox | October 21, 2008If you thought I was jumping on the bandwagon by blogging, check this out: Midori-san's Blog. OK, so it's not in english, so unless you've got a good translator you might have some trouble. I'll tell you what's so interesting about it - the author is this guy here:
That's right, it's a plant's blog. Of course, Pigeons have been blogging for years now, so is anyone really impressed?
Satoshi Kuribayashi, a researcher at Keio University, Japan, explains the motive for vegetative blogging. "We were initially interested in what plants are feeling and what they are reacting to where we can't see,"…
tlambert | October 20, 20082008 Wallace Wurth Memorial Lecture:
Dr Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), will deliver the 2008 Wallace Wurth Memorial Lecture in UNSW's John Niland Scientia Building on Thursday 23 October at 7:30pm.
Dr Pachaui's lecture is entitled Our Vulnerable Earth - Climate Change, the IPCC and the role of Generation Green. He will also receive an Honorary Doctorate of Science from the University in recognition of his eminent service to the community. ...
The lecture series is named after Wallace Charles Wurth, the University's first Chancellor.…
grrlscientist | October 20, 2008I lost my wifi access so, after hours of searching, I finally found an alternative free wifi source (but who knows how long this will last?). So I can now share with you the latest carnivalia for your reading pleasure:
All Things Eco, issue 22. This is a blog carnival that focuses on ecology and environment.