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gregladen | January 23, 2013In a good way!
This is a very interesting story; I'm going to pass along the press release without modification:
NEA PRESIDENT SUPPORTS SEATTLE EDUCATORS WHO REFUSE TO GIVE FLAWED STANDARDIZED TEST
***Standardized test takes away from student learning***
WASHINGTON—National Education Association (NEA) members at Garfield High School in Seattle, Wash., voted to not administer the district-mandated Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) standardized test that is not aligned with state standards or the district curriculum. NEA has long urged for the careful consideration of the fact that these…
gregladen | January 23, 2013This is smallish, but many of you will appreciate it: Comments now have numbers, like they should! So, we'all can more effectively yell at each other in the comments section! Yay!
jrosenhouse | January 22, 2013Remember that scene in A Fish Called Wanda, where Kevin Kline, talking to a British woman who has cornered him in rhetorical combat, says, with maximal sarcasm, “Oh, you British are soooooo superior.”
That's pretty much how I feel when I read essays written by agnostics. By all means make whatever arguments it amuses you to make for not taking a stand on the God question. But please stop acting like you're soooooo superior. You're not the sensible middle ground between two extremes, and you're not the clear-thinking pluralist calmly sifting the evidence. You're just a wimp.
The latest…
jrosenhouse | January 21, 2013One thing I noticed during the years I spent attending YEC conferences was the extent to which pseudointellectualism was an integral part of their culture. The leaders of the movement frequently behaved in ways reminiscent of how non-scientists imagine that scientists behave.
This is definitely a point of commonality between YEC and ID. A recent case in point is this post from Cornelius Hunter, a frequent contributor to Uncommon Descent. If you are unfamiliar with Hunter's writing, his big theme, repeated in almost every one of his posts, is that evolution is purely a religious belief,…
jrosenhouse | January 20, 2013I finally got around to seeing Lincoln yesterday. Great movie! Daniel Day-Lewis is as good as you've heard. James Spader probably deserved a supporting actor nomination for playing the leader of a group of three people dispatched by Lincoln to encourage, cajole, and openly bribe wavering Democratic representatives. (The Republicans were the good guys in those days, at least on this issue.)
This is not a biopic about Lincoln, but instead focuses exclusively on the months leading up to the passage of the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution. It is natural, when watching such a film,…
jdupuis | January 19, 2013Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure.
Every year for the last bunch of years I’ve been linking to and posting about all the “year’s best sciencey books” lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year.
All the previous 2012 lists are here.
This post includes the following: Top Books of 2012: History of Science, Paleontology , Zoolology.
Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History by Ahmad Dallal
Smoking Ears and Screaming Teeth: A Celebration of Scientific Eccentricity and Self-Experimentation by Trevor…
carlyo | January 18, 2013--Widely considered the founder of modern-day Pediatric Cardiology
--Discovered the cause of “Blue Baby Syndrome” in infants, and helped ban the use of the drug Thalidomide for pregnant women in the U.S.
--Battled dyslexia as a child, and deafness in the later years of her career
For years, physicians were baffled by “Blue Baby Syndrome” – a mysterious condition in which infants, either at birth or soon after, died after their skin became blue-tinted in color. The prevailing medical thought was that the condition was caused by cardiac arrest. However, a young physician and researcher named…
gregladen | January 18, 2013... in preparation for an attack.
Also, more evidence, which you did not need, of how many people are in cars at any given moment, apparently!
This is a map where there are dots representing each and every person in the US and Canada. It is zoomable. Is is HERE. It is pretty freakin' cool.
It is also about all I've got for you today. Over the last two weeks the immediate and extended family has been ravaged with illness and stuff, things are in a state of slow down. When I'm not laying there sick, I'm taking care of Huxley, who is laying there sick, or, the two of us are laying there…
carlyo | January 17, 2013--Called the "Father of the Green Revolution"
--Using research in plant genetics, he developed high-yielding, disease-resistant strains of wheat and other crops to dramatically increase food production in poor, developing countries
--Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work
In addition to being called the "Father of the Green Revolution", American agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug also became known as the "The Man Who Saved A Billion Lives" through his work. During the mid-20th century, Norman -- who was born and raised on his grandparents' farm in Iowa and later earned his Ph.D…
illconsidered | January 17, 2013Global warming stopped [insert random number of years] ago is probably the most common and mainstream of all the climate denier arguments out there. It is shallow and wrong and there are many refutations of it out there. I think this video from Skeptical Science is about as clear and straightforward as it gets.
If someone watches that and still thinks the argument holds water, then they can not be reached with reason.
If attribution arguments are too complicated, there is always this excellent graphic:
(click to enlarge)
mspringer | January 16, 2013Ok, so this isn't really physics as such, but it's pretty fascinating. There's a very large online community called Reddit in which users submit links which interest them. These links come with two little arrows beside them, and the users can vote the link up or down. Here's a screenshot of how the website looks to me at the time of this writing:
As I visit on different days or on different times on the same day, the links and their order changes. This keeps the site fresh and news-y, at least if you like your news full of cat memes. It's pretty clear that the ordering of these links is both…
jrosenhouse | January 15, 2013Today we have cause to celebrate. I am breaking the months-long chess drought at this blog. You see, the future game of the year was just played in the big chess tournament at Wijk aan Zee in the Netherlands, and I could not live with myself if I did not share it with you.
Playing white is Levon Aronian, currently ranked number two in the world. Playing black is Viswanathan Anand, the current World Champion. Anand's results over the last few years have not been up to his historical standards. He barely managed to keep his title last year, and he has not won a tournament in over four…
carlyo | January 15, 2013--Trained as a nuclear physicist, she abandoned that field to travel the world researching the behavior and history of bees
--Established the first worldwide organization for exchanging authoritative research information on bees
Born in Britain in 1912, Eva Crane earned a Ph.D. in nuclear physics but left that field to pursue her fascination with bees and their hives -- a deep interest cultivated after she received a box of bees as a wedding gift in 1942. (Such a present was very much welcome in Britain during those days of World War II to help lessen the short supply of sugar.) Eva would…
gregladen | January 15, 2013Usually, it’s “Bird eating fish” but here we have a case of a “Bird-eating fish.”
The Wels Catfish, Silurus glanis, is the second largest fish in its range, which covers much of Europe and parts of West Asia. In parts of Western Europe, it is considered to be “exotic” because it has been introduced, possibly by anglers, in lakes and rivers in France and the Iberian Peninsula. It has also found its way to Japan where it is considered to be an invasive species. It is sometimes known as the European Catfish.
... Read the rest here at 10,000 Birds!
sastyk | January 14, 2013Stuart Staniford has a WONDERFUL post about what I think is the most likely scenario - we finally acknowledge the (obvious, scientifically clear) reality of climate change and panic, and try and fix it...having waited too long. He asks...what might that look like? He's not shooting for perfect accuracy here, just some general scenarios, and I think he comes to what is generally the right conclusion, always barring the real but harder to model possibility of a non-linear change;
The red curve shows what happens if we wait another decade - until 2030 - to start bending the emissions curve,…
jrosenhouse | January 11, 2013As part of their ongoing campaign to botch as many personnel decisions as possible, the Obama administration recently announced that the Reverend Louie Giglio, of Atlanta, would deliver the benediction at the forthcoming inaugural. They rescinded the invitation, however, when an anti-gay sermon preached by Giglio many years ago came to light. The administration should have thought to look for such things before inviting him, but at least they belatedly did the right thing.
Some of the mopier denizens of the religious right are less pleased, however. This article, over at HuffPo, rounds up…
gregladen | January 11, 2013It is Influenza Season in the Northern Hemisphere. So, this is a good time to talk about the flu. Three years ago we had an unusual flu season, with a nasty variant about that seemed to be threatening a pandemic, and that's the year Huxley was born (in November) so we faced the problem of getting an off season flu shot and not being a member of a Fortune 500 company. We also faced the problem of varying levels of understanding of the flu, and varying odd beliefs about it, among people to whom newborn Huxley might be exposed. This year, my S-I-L is expecting to produce an offspring some…
hrynyshyn | January 11, 2013Inside Climate News reports that "The New York Times will close its environment desk in the next few weeks and assign its seven reporters and two editors to other departments. The positions of environment editor and deputy environment editor are being eliminated." Is this a good thing or bad?
The conventional response would be that it represents a loss of commitment to the subject. Dean Baquet, the paper's managing editor for news, says not all:
... environmental stories are "partly business, economic, national or local, among other subjects," Baquet said. "They are more complex. We need to…
jrosenhouse | January 10, 2013The annual Joint Mathematics Meetings are taking place in San Diego this week. For the first time in more than a decade, they are taking place without me. Well, if I can't actually go this year, I might as well write about it. I have a guest post up over at the Oxford University Press blog doing just that. Enjoy!