thusspakezuska | November 4, 2007October has come and gone, and the Scienceblogs Donors Choose Challenge is over. You helped TSZ raise $1500 of a total $54,335 from all Scienceblogs challenges. That plus the $15,000 matching funds from Seed brings the total amount raised for Donors Choose to $69,335!!!! Over 155 classroom projects have been fully funded, and thousands of children affected by the generosity of Scienceblogs readers.
I promised you at the beginning of October that everyone who donated to my challenge would be entered in a raffle for a special TSZ t-shirt that reads "Zuska Says: Don't Make Me Puke On Your…
thusspakezuska | November 4, 2007Ladies, all these years you've been using blenders and understood them as belonging to the category "kitchen gadget".
But when he uses the manly new stainless steel RPM blender, it's not a kitchen gadget, it's a tool!
Or so the manly man on HGTV's "I Want That! Kitchens" informed viewers this afternoon.
It was a beautiful spot on the show. We saw the happy nuclear family at home, mom reading to the kids, and dad - dad practiced a few karate kicks for the camera. That helped establish his manliness for us, prior to us seeing him in the kitchen using that gadget - I mean, the new RPM…
thusspakezuska | November 1, 2007Something a little lighter after all that Watson-puke of recent days...
...The World's Fair's exceptional "I rank number one on google!" meme!!!!
I'd like to suggest a meme, where the premise is that you will attempt to find 5 statements, which if you were to type into google (preferably google.com, but we'll take the other country specific ones if need be), you'll find that you are returned with your blog as the number one hit...
To make it easier, we'll let you use a search statement enclosed in quotations - this is just to increase your chances of turning up as number one, but if you…
thusspakezuska | November 1, 2007David Perlmutter, professor and associate dean for graduate studies and research in the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas, has a column in the November 2 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education on knowing when to keep a secret. Perlmutter offers up some good advice about managing one's career by knowing when to hold one's tongue, or even by avoiding hearing the secret someone else is dying to share. He suggests you fend off the would-be gossipers by saying, "I think I know what you are going to tell me, and it's really none of…
thusspakezuska | November 1, 2007Yes, it's November 1, and that means Scientiae time! Over at Yami's place, Green Gabbro.
I begged and begged my fellow male Sciblings to take up Yami's challenge and participate in this Scientiae, and two - count 'em, two! - of them responded! Kudos to Abel Pharmboy at Terra Sigillata and Chris Rowan at Highly Allochthonous. Which is better than none, and I am sure the others were preoccupied with many pressing tasks, and will find time on some other day to ponder gender issues. I should also note the two posts that Bill Hooker at Open Reading Frame contributed.
Yami's version of the…
thusspakezuska | October 29, 2007Wow! I asked, and you responded. Thanks! My challenge is funded at 100%. That's $1500 (actually, a little more) impacting 345 schoolkids!
You can still donate if you want to, even though my initial goal has been reached. There are still some open proposals on my challenge list, including two of the ones I described here.
Thanks again! And don't forget, if you donate, there is a seriously good chance of winning the fab Seed prizes.
thusspakezuska | October 29, 2007When I was a postdoctoral student my supervisor sent me for three or four days to what we participants called "cancer camp". It was a mini-course on the histopathbiology of cancer. We learned to interpret pathology slides, how to look at them, read them, identify cancer in all its various forms and stages. We were taught the vocabulary that pathologists use. Just as importantly, we were taught how to see. How to understand what it was we were looking at, to tease the meaning out of the brightly colored and oddly shaped masses we were looking at in the microscope. Without being taught…
thusspakezuska | October 29, 2007...the deadline for the end of the Donors Choose fund drive is rapidly approaching. I'm bummed that it looks like TSZ will not reach 100% of its funding goal. That means some potential matching funds will go unclaimed. I realize many of you may have other favorite charities you support, so I thank you for considering Donors Choose.
Wouldn't you like to donate to Experiments in Calculus? Help a teacher buy two calculator-based data collectors to let students learn calculus through experiments with distance, velocity, and acceleration. There's a teacher in Trenton who needs funds to buy…
thusspakezuska | October 29, 2007Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily introduced today a new set of icons that will help readers identify blogging on peer-reviewed research. You can find the full announcement below the fold, including info on where to find the icons, how to use them, and how to find blog posts tagged with the icons.
We're pleased to announce that BPR3's Blogging on Peer Reviewed Research icons are now ready to go! Anyone can use these icons to show when they're making a serious post about peer-reviewed research, rather than just linking to a news article or press release.
Within a month, these blog posts will…
thusspakezuska | October 27, 2007Some great posts on other blogs you may have missed reading:
Language Log has a great critique of the new PBS show WordGirl, which I found via Fairer Science. If that's not enough to make you grind your teeth, then read Pat's roundup on the Bionic Woman, Ubisoft's Imagine video games, and Barbie Girls. Bleah.
Female Science Professor ran into Dr. Troll this week upon coming out of a committee meeting. Dr. Troll asked her if she was taking a class from the other committee members. I am not making this up. You can read about it here. I mean, really. You have to work at being that much…
thusspakezuska | October 27, 2007Since Jim Watson's recent self-destruction, there's been a lot of talk about pseudo-scientific racism versus actual "scientific" studies of race. Earlier this summer, Lennard J. Davis had an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled A Grand Unified Theory of Interdisciplinarity in which he had this to say about race and ethnicity in the sciences/medicine versus the humanities/social science:
A truly interdisciplinary approach is potentially dangerous: Some kinds of knowledge might refute or negate other kinds of knowledge. For example, if we took the advances the humanities have made…
thusspakezuska | October 26, 2007By now everyone knows that Jim Watson has resigned his position at CSHL. But the damage he's done will live on long afterwards. Consider this comment from a reader (emphasis added):
As a non-scientist, I'd like to point out an unpredictable side-effect of Watson's remarks that might make scientists cringe. Yesterday a student in my women's studies class used Watson's comments on race and differential intelligence (along with an NPR interview with Phil Rushton on the same theme) to illustrate scientific findings on that subject. Her larger point was to suggest that the singular enterprise…
thusspakezuska | October 25, 2007So you're despairing of your future as an academic research scientist, and looking for "alternative" careers. When I was a grad student and postdoc I often heard my fellow students/postdocs say things like "well, I'll just get a teaching job" or "I'll just go teach at a community college". The implication was that any community college would be so incredibly grateful that such a fabulous research scientists had deigned to come teach at their lowly ranks, they would jump at the chance to hire them.
Admittedly I was a graduate student a hundred years ago, and maybe this kind of attitude no…
thusspakezuska | October 24, 2007Didn't you get something like this from your parents when you were younger?
"You kids don't know how easy you have it. When I was young, I had to walk to school! In the snow! Uphill! Both ways!"
Well, a bunch of us Sciencebloggers recently got to reminiscing about the good ol' days, when we were young, and computers were in their infancy, and we had to walk to school uphill both ways just to get our punch cards. And if you don't know what a punch card is, three whacks with a slide rule for you! And if you don't know what a slide rule is...ahhh...just go read all our little stories…
thusspakezuska | October 24, 2007PZ Myers is a really nice person and I love Pharyngula - I just spent a nice half hour reading it, and among other good stuff I encountered there was a link in this post to Robert Hooke's notebooks online. Very cool indeed, and totally geekalicious.
But I'm also aware of this recent distasteful post wherein PZ offers up an apologia for Jim Watson. You know, he just has these repellent personal opinions; he's an asshole; but we all have to learn to tolerate this because he's such a fucking hero.
A healthy dose of puke for your shoes, PZ. If Watson suddenly announces that design theory…
thusspakezuska | October 19, 2007The latest Watson news is that Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has "suspended [his] administrative responsibilities...pending further deliberation by the board." Watson, meanwhile, has begun the "Did I say that? No! I didn't mean it!" apologia that usually follows when some noted figure catches hell for being more frank about his or her racist views than the public is used to.
He also said that "to all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly…
thusspakezuska | October 19, 2007This week's Friday Bookshelf is actually a repeat of a blog post from the old blog site. It begins with a question:
Who was Annie Montague Alexander?
She lived from 1867 to 1950. Naturalist and philanthropist, she was the founder of two natural history museums at the University of California, Berkeley. Over her lifetime, she ranged widely throughout western North America and beyond, collecting specimens of plants and animals as well as fossils, many of which formed the basis of the museum collections. Early on she realized that increasing population growth in California was threatening…
thusspakezuska | October 18, 2007You may have noticed on the main Scienceblogs page that the major categories have been reduced in number and renamed; we now have eight, each with its own spiffy landing page. For example, here's the one for Education & Careers. Each landing page has a photo at the top; these photos will be rotating and guess what? You can contribute yours if you like!
More info on how to contribute your photos is below the fold.
It's not too hard: the image needs to be at least 465 pixels wide. You should send your photos to
photos AT scienceblogs DOT com
and be sure to send only photos that you…
thusspakezuska | October 18, 2007From the BBC News:
The Science Museum has cancelled a talk by American DNA pioneer Dr James Watson after he claimed black people were less intelligent than white people...saying his views went "beyond the point of acceptable debate".
Skills Minister David Lammy said Dr Watson's views "were deeply offensive". He added: "They will succeed only in providing oxygen for the BNP.
"It is a shame that a man with a record of scientific distinction should see his work overshadowed by his own irrational prejudices."
...A spokesman for the Science Museum said: "We know that eminent scientists can…
thusspakezuska | October 17, 2007Primate Diaries passed this meme on to me. It was started by Scibling PZ Myers at Pharyngula as a means of demonstrating evolution in cyberspace.
First, the rules:
There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...". Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:
* You can leave them exactly as is.
* You can delete any one question.
* You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change "The…