worldsfair | December 4, 2007Last week (or thereabouts), I had a chat with Rosie Redfield, an evolutionary biologist at the University of British Columbia. She had come over to visit because I noticed that every member of her lab (predominantly postdocs) had their own blog, and I was curious to see what was up with that.
Anyway, it turns out that Rosie makes it a requirement for her lab members to maintain a blog. This was primarily to act as an appendum lab book, and a place to reflect on the experiments carried out recently.
Chatting with her, she was quite excited by the prospect of such a thing becoming common…
bcohen | November 30, 2007Continuing with cartoon week here at The World's Fair, we offer this one from Herb Block, circa 1977:
I'll leave this without undue editorializing, instead wondering if readers will offer their own take on this thirty-year old view of research agenda-setting, policy making, and government of scientific medical research.
bcohen | November 28, 2007Our alternative sponsor for November (arriving very late in the month) is a Tom Meyer cartoon.
(by Tom Meyer, SF Chronicle cartoonist, as reprinted in Ann Vileisis's Kitchen Literacy, p. 213)
We offer this, as always, to call attention to favorite Sb sponsor Dow Chemical (though I haven't seen the Dow ads for a while -- then again, I haven't been here for a while). It seems that a crew testing Michigan's Saginaw River recently found dioxin contaminations from Dow in amounts heretofore unheard of ("about 20 times higher than any other find recorded in the archives of the U.S. environmental…
bcohen | November 26, 2007A Tom Toles editorial cartoon, from Sunday's Washington Post
I thought it was well put. It offers a concise vision of decision-making practices to someone (namely, me) predisposed to think about what makes evidence evidence and what makes for sound, well-supported reasoning. Among other things.
bcohen | November 26, 2007I just picked up Jonah's book, Proust was a Neuroscientist, which so far has me thinking differently about the other things I read. And with Whitman as the first chapter, I got to thumbing through some poetry. Plus, it's a nice season for poetry.
Moving on, inelegant as this transition may be....
We've posted a poem by the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborksa before ("Discover"). Here is another, called "A Note." I liked it.
Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on sand,
rise on wings;
to be a dog,
or stroke its warm fur;
to tell pain
from everything it's not;
to…
bcohen | November 26, 2007Stephen Jay Gould in Simpsons' form
Just asking. I had a whole explanation about what brought me to wonder about this, but you don't really care, so I'll skip it. Between three and eight of you would've found the back-story interesting. No matter, the other 27 wouldn't have.
Cutting to the chase then: the Scienceblogs readers and other bloggers, especially of course the dominant strain of evolution/Darwin folks, must have some opinions. A gifted author, a popularizer, a baseball fan, a Simpsons guest, an evolutionary biologist, a good friend of one of my doctoral committee members, a…
bcohen | November 25, 2007Taking a cue from Dave's recent meme-games and my own reading of the weekend book review section of the paper, I'm inspired to wonder how many answers can fit the following blanks:
"The period between the end of _______ and the end of ______ is one of the most important in American history and, these days, one of the most neglected."
This sentence was part of a review of Daniel Walker Howe's What God Hath Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. The review was by Jonathan Yardley; recently, Jill Lepore had a fascinating essay centering on the same book in The New Yorker. Popular…
worldsfair | November 23, 2007
The SCQ has rounded up most of the scientific eponyms created as a result of a meme call. Take a gander, and let me know if you want to play as well. This particular page can hopefully expand over time. (link)
My favourite right now is the Semeniuk-Bjorge-Colby Score which has the keywords: sex, hairyness, and pity.
worldsfair | November 22, 2007
This is for all you folks in Vancouver who happen to have some time to kill tomorrow (Friday) at lunch.
The UBC Terry Project is having James MacKinnon and Alisa Smith give a talk. These are the authors of "The 100-Mile Diet," a bestseller and buzz worthy book that uses a social experiment (can we subsist on only eating things produced within a 100 mile radius?) to look into the world of food politics, economics, and culture. Extra bonus is that James and Alisa also happen to be Vancouverites, so their story has this wonderful local angle to it.The talk, entitled "The 100-Mile Diet" will…
worldsfair | November 21, 2007Well, one of the big news items these days, is the "re-adjustment" of HIV infection statistics coming out of UNAIDS. Apparently, the numbers that have been used over the last couple of years have been too high and that the new numbers are significantly lower. For example, the worldwide infection numbers dropped from 40 million to 33 million. (news reports nyt, bbc)
In many respects, this begs the question, "So what?" These numbers are still the sort that can merit strong words such as "genocide" and/or "carnage" to attempt to let ordinary individuals like ourselves understand the horror…
worldsfair | November 20, 2007This post over at the Terry website is nice, and poses an interesting question.
Tonight, as I walked home past the hospital and the lights and the young teenage couple standing under the walkway and the older couple sitting on the bench, I thought to myself, "I wonder how much energy is required to light these every season? How much carbon is being used up just to light this display?"
I stopped in stride. "How could I ask myself such a ridiculous questions - who cares, its beautiful!" I thought, "Look how many people are enjoying it, this symbol of bliss and happiness that has marked a dozen…
worldsfair | November 19, 2007
A few weeks ago, the New Yorker ran an excellent piece called "Unconventional Crude" which focused on Canada's tar sands. It was written by Elizabeth Kolbert, who got a lot of attention a year or so ago with a three part New Yorker piece called "The Climate of Man." (which was a summarized form of her book "Field Notes of a Catastrophe," and also something I found a pdf copy of on the web)
Anyway, I can't find the entire piece on line, but the New Yorker does offer up a good abstract with many of the relevant facts. Worth checking out, especially if you consider yourself the sort who "…
worldsfair | November 16, 2007So why enter one in particular. The SCQ makes a case for their iPod and truth experiment giveaway. It starts:
It seems obvious to most people that iPods are a ubiquitous part of culture. But for folks like myself who also look after a website, the notion of an iPod contest is just as pervasive. A good indicator of this is to simply google a few pertinent terms. In fact, when I did that with the phrase "Win an iPod" (in quotes) I was actually returned with an astounding 2,000,000 hits.
More enlightening, is if you narrow down the search to limit the term mentioned within the last week (…
worldsfair | November 15, 2007Good old McSweeney's scores again.
Free Range:
Animals raised with a free-range lifestyle have plenty of room to stretch out and eat bugs. This is particularly important for chickens, which need at least two square feet of space at all times. Factory-farming conditions are like living in apartment buildings in big cities: a co-op is formed within the coop, and the poultry have grinding meetings on where to put the satellite dish and how much to tip the doorman at Christmas. As in a human co-op, any new members deemed unsatisfactory or weak are pecked to death. Other free-range items, such as…
worldsfair | November 14, 2007We had such great fun with the "I rank number 1!" meme, that I thought it would be worth the effort to try another. This one might even guarantee you a spot in immortality - especially if your contribution manages to strike a chord with academia.
Anyway, this meme asks that you come up with your own scientific eponym. What's that exactly? Well, first read this excellent primer by Samuel Arbesman, which basically provides a step by step description of how to do this effectively. Then have a go at your own blog. If all goes well, I'd like to create a page at the Science Creative Quarterly…
worldsfair | November 13, 2007
Today the SCQ published what can only be described as a necessary appendum to the IPCC reports. The title above is but one of many papers sited, and the others are presented below (and below the fold). Of course, like any good scientist, you'll have to dig deeper to make sense of them, but you can get the review here (OTHER POSSIBLE CAUSES OF GLOBAL WARMING: A LITERATURE REVIEW)
Waddleton, et al., 2000, "Cool Summer Temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere: Evidence for Temporal Correlation with Mrs. Price's Oven Repair Work," Climate Studies 12: 55
Rigby, et al., 1972, "Mrs. Price Slow…
worldsfair | November 13, 2007
So, I just went to a Science Journalism conference recently. And one of the sessions, in particular, that resulted in a heated argument, was whether the internet and the whole Web2.0 was a good thing.
Particularly from the angle of whether it was good at providing science news, or increasing science literacy generally. The arguments (pro and con) more or less went as follows:
With the web, you have an incredible increase in accessibility, as well as the ability of following up the paper trail of what it is that is being reported (i.e. you can track down the original source relatively…
worldsfair | November 10, 2007I have to say that I really enjoyed this presentation by Sir Ken Robinson. Well worth the twenty minutes. Curious about comments too from you educators out there.
Ben, do you think this guy is a contender for our advisory board?