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carlyo | March 11, 2013Celebrating Women's History Month with another Role Model in STEM!
Combining her skills in math, science and the arts, Italian Architect Gae Aulenti has become known as a leading figure of contemporary architecture.
To read her full biography and all of our STEM profiles click here
jrosenhouse | March 10, 2013I have now returned form my travels in Baltimore and Washington DC. The big Hopkins talk went well, I think. Then I moseyed on down to Washington DC to hang out. This past week was spring break around here, though you would never have known it from the weather.
While I was in DC, I took advantage of the excellent E Street Cinema to see some films I would not otherwise have had a chance to see (not in a theater, at any rate.) I first discovered this theater when I made a special trip to DC a while back to see Creation, a pretty good biopic about Charles Darwin. Little chance of that…
lborkowski | March 8, 2013by Kim Krisberg
In a little less than a month, public health workers and their community partners in Macomb County, Mich., will set up at the local Babies"R"Us store to offer parents a free child car seat check. The Macomb County Health Department has been organizing such car seat checks for years now, knowing that proper child vehicle restraints can truly mean the difference between mild and severe injuries, or between survival and death.
The car seat check is taking place April 4 in observance of the fourth day of this year's National Public Health Week (NPHW) celebration, which officially…
carlyo | March 7, 2013Celebrating Women's History Month with another Role Model in Science & Engineering!
Sylvia Earle, a leading Oceanographer and Environmentalist conducts pioneering research in marine ecosystems; named a "Hero for the Planet" by Time magazine.
To read the fascinating biography of Sylvia Earle click here
choofnagle | March 6, 2013Denialism blog readers, especially those at academic institutions that have/are considering outsourcing email, may be interested in my essay on UC Berkeley's migration to Gmail. This is cross-posted from the Berkeley Blog.
Many campuses have decided to outsource email and other services to “cloud” providers. Berkeley has joined in by migrating student and faculty to bMail, operated by Google. In doing so, it has raised some anxiety about privacy and autonomy in communications. In this post, I outline some advantages of our outsourcing to Google, some disadvantages, and how we might…
carlyo | March 6, 2013March is Women's History Month and the theme this year is "Women Inspiring Innovation Through Imagination: Celebrating Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics".
We celebrate Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics year round at the USA Science & Engineering Festival so of course we are thrilled with the choice of theme this year. All month long we will continue to honor Role Models in Science & Engineering Achievement; however we will turn our focus to women in STEM. The scientists and engineers selected for this series have been chosen because they are…
gregladen | March 6, 2013John Platt has a nice summary of recent activity in the are of de-extinction. This is where you use modern genetic techniques to bring species that are extinct back into existence.
I find it interesting that casual talk about this sort of thing almost always starts out with things like de-extinction very large and very long extinct, and I'm sure, very expensive to take care of creatures like dinosaurs or wooly mammoths. People in the de-extinction business (and there are some, and there have even been some efforts carried out) are more realistic, of course.
I've always said we should…
gregladen | March 6, 2013Pretty soon, I'm going to be giving away two pounds of free coffee on my blog. Just thought you'd like to know. It is special coffee. You'll have to do something to get it, though.
gregladen | March 6, 2013You should check out "The Beauty Issue," the latest issue of MPLSzine, a Twin Cities based on line magazine, in which I have a contribution.
carlyo | March 5, 2013By Festival Founder Larry Bock
It's strange but true: some of the most prodigious innovations in technology are often not born in the corridors of rational thought and reality, but on the wings of fantasy.
I was reminded of this recently while reading the various tributes to legendary science fiction writer Ray Bradbury who died last year at age 91. Bradbury, whose best-known works include The Martian Chronicles, and Fahrenheit 451, was a master at using his imagination to bring us face-to-face with our growing love affair, fascination -- and, at times, wariness -- of technology and the price…
gregladen | March 5, 2013That title is ambiguous but only if one admits to vernacular usage. Which is legit.
Huxley is consonantly making grammatical errors that primarily serve to prove how stupid adults are. English has a typical way of marking past tense, for instance, and he uses it all the time, correctly. So he might have hided himself behind the couch. Or, so he sayed. I see-ed him in the bedroom so maybe he hided himself there.
The thing is, we have language rules that are based on nothing more than historical quirkiness and BS, and language rules that are based on the particular system a language morphology…
jrosenhouse | March 3, 2013I finally created a Twitter account, mostly so that I could find out who keeps tweeting about my posts. The little Twitter counter under the title consistently has some pleasingly non-zero number in it, so I thought I should find out what people are saying. Alas, whenever I click on the little number, it just takes me to the home page I just created. But that's not what I wanted! If someone wants to talk gently to me and explain what I am doing wrong, I'll be happy to hear it.
jrosenhouse | March 3, 2013Tomorrow I'll be leaving for sunny Baltimore, Maryland. Tuesday evening I will be speaking at Johns Hopkins about the mathematics of Sudoku. To judge from the advertisement, it looks like it will be quite the party!
Since its spring break around here, on Wednesday I will leave Baltimore to head over to Washington D.C. for a few days. I'll be seeing the National Symphony Orchestra perform on Thursday night, but that's as far as I've gotten plan-wise. See you when I return!
jrosenhouse | March 2, 2013I had two big deadlines this Friday for various projects, and I am happy to report that I made both of them. That means I finally have time to take a breath, and write the post you have all been waiting for. What happened at the U. S. Amateur Team East chess tournament!?
That's right! Over President's weekend I made my annual pilgrimage to Parsippany, NJ, to play in the biggest tournament of the year. With something like 1200 players, it's really just a big chess party. I don't play nearly as much tournament chess as I used to, but I definitely make an effort to come out of retirement…
denialism | March 2, 2013There's been an interesting edit in Marc Bittman's sugar post, as he has now changed his tune on the PLoS one sugar study, now Bittman acknowledges obesity too is important. That was big of him, it is after all, the most important factor. Maybe my angry letter to the editor had an effect, but he's grudgingly changed this statement:
In other words, according to this study, obesity doesn’t cause diabetes: sugar does.
To:
In other words, according to this study, it’s not just obesity that can cause diabetes: sugar can cause it, too, irrespective of obesity. And obesity does not always lead to…
gregladen | March 1, 2013... is not what you thought it was, no matter what you were thinking. According to this interesting moving infographic movie thingie:
carlyo | March 1, 2013Celebrating Black History Month with another Role Model in Science & Engineering!
"Born to be a mathematician and physicist" we are thrilled that Dr. Sylvester James Gates returns to the Festival as a Nifty Fifty Speaker. Growing up, his father brought him an Encyclopedia Britannica and he came across Schroedinger's equation, which is one of the foundations of modern physics. Gates claimed, "It was like walking on a beach and finding a marvelous shell and being fascinated by it."
To read the full biography of Dr. Gates click here.
carlyo | February 27, 2013Celebrating Black History Month with another Role Model in Science & Engineering!
Festival Nifty Fifty Speaker & Physicist Dr. Herman White smashes atoms for a living and he loves it! We are honored to have Dr. White as a key speaker for the Festival! To read the full biography of this distinguished scientist click here.
gregladen | February 27, 2013Humans appear to have a great deal of variation in sexual orientation, in what is often referred to as "gender" and in adult behavior generally. When convenient, people will point to "genes" as the "cause" of any particular subset of this diversity (or all of it). When convenient, people will point to "culture" as the "cause" of ... whatever. The "real" story is more complicated, less clear, and very interesting. And, starting now, I promise to stop using so many "scare" quotes.
Fixed up and reposted.
Prior to birth there are a number of factors than can influence things like gender or…
tsmith | February 25, 2013First of five student guest posts by Kristen Coleman
Every morning as I prepare for class, I go through the same internal dialogue, “to wear or not to wear my hearing aide.” I am forced to do this because when I was a child I, like most American children (about 80% by age 3 as estimated by the American Academy of Family Practitioners, AAFP), suffered from otitis media and my treatment resulted in hearing loss. The treatment I underwent was called tympanostomy with ventilation tube insertion, which has rapidly become the most common reason for general anesthesia in children in the United…