What we're talking about 
Friday, August 17, 2012
Runaway Warming
The Melting of Earth’s Northern Ice Cap: Update
Greg Laden's Blog August 15, 2012
We are becoming aware of two very important changes in the Arctic that you need to know about. These are separate thing but related, and both are almost certainly the outcome of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). They are: The sea ice that covers much of the Arctic Sea during the winter is normally reduced during…
Arctic Methane Emergency Group?
Stoat March 17, 2012
From Climate ‘tech fixes’ urged for Arctic methane I find ameg.me who say: AMEG POSITION DECLARATION OF EMERGENCY We declare there now exists an extremely high international security risk* from abrupt and runaway global warming being triggered by the end-summer collapse of Arctic sea ice towards a fraction of the current record and release of…
Channel Surfing
Life Science
I don’t know whether it’s by design or fortuitous incompetence, but creationists are masters of the fuzzy statement that opens the doors to all kinds of new opportunities for ignorance. Missouri, for instance, just passed a law giving themselves the freedom to pray (a freedom they already had, which is not in peril) and at…
The phrase has entirely different connotations for cephalopods. Bonus! Spot the female before going to the diagram. (via Giant Cuttlefish)
My cat, Emily, tends to get a bit sulky when I leave her for long periods of time. So when I returned home from New York the other day, having been gone for a week, I was not surprised when she did not greet me at the door. Par for the course, I thought. She’ll…
Physical Science
“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.” -Albert Einstein The Mars Curiosity Rover and the Mars Science Laboratory mission are so important that writing about the landing, going on the news, and writing about it again simply wasn’t enough. So when the Portland Tribune called…
Heads up, peeps. NSF Portfolio Review is out Mayall, WIYN, 2.1m KPNO, GBT and VLBA are out in recommended scenarios. Shit. Portfolio Review – full text 170 pp (pdf) To summarise: Kitt Peak telescopes cut; Green Bank Radio Telescope and Very Large Baseline Array cut; McM-P Solar Telescope cut before Advanced Solar Telescope starts. Committee…
An amusing tidbit, from HuffPo: The U.S. population has reached a nerdy and delightful milestone. Shortly after 2:29 p.m. on Tuesday, August 14, 2012, the U.S. population was exactly 314,159,265, or pi (π) times 100 million, the U.S. Census Bureau reports. The U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Clock projects the real-time size of the U.S. population…
Environment
People want to talk about sea ice, clearly. I still have nothing interesting to say about it, so instead, lets start off at KK‘s, who parrots the odd assertion that there are “Plenty of stories in media with just one scientist, and no counter view at all“. Which in turn is some septic whinging that…
Two bills we’ve written about recently are now law: President Obama signed the “Honoring America’s Veterans and Caring for Camp Lejeune Families Act of 2012,” and Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick signed the “Temporary Workers Right to Know Act.”
The Pump Handle
Worker falls 70+ feet to his death at ConAgra mill, another at a Pepisco plant, manlifts involved in both cases
Three multi-national corporations. Three workers dead from manlift incidents. Preventing more deaths from manlifts requires comprehensive fatality investigations.
Humanities
My cat, Emily, tends to get a bit sulky when I leave her for long periods of time. So when I returned home from New York the other day, having been gone for a week, I was not surprised when she did not greet me at the door. Par for the course, I thought. She’ll…
The latest Health Wonk Review features posts on healthcare quality, the Affordable Care Act, Paul Ryan, and other healthcare issues.
I read a recent report from the Swedish Institute of Futures Studies titled Humanisterna och framtidssamhället, “Humanities Scholars and Society in the Future” (freely available as a PDF). I found some but not too much of the usual unrealistic sloganeering about how useful the humanities are to society, and a lot of pretty sobering statistics.…
Education
On my lap, I’ve got a set of school books that date from the 1850s to the 1890s. They belonged to various of my father’s family – my great-uncle, George Hume, who died long before I was born and studied Eaton’s Common School Arithmetic in Amesbury, MA in the late 19th century, 20 miles from…
We recently witnessed the disagreement over the official memorial for the 11 Israeli athletes killed at the Munich Olympics 40 years ago. Fewer remember the terrorist attack in the Lod airport a few months earlier – in May – in which 24 people lost their lives. One of those was the head of the Weizmann…
Politics
Bain Capital: “all β and no α”
One thing I have learned from more than a decade of teaching mathematics is that it is very easy to bamboozle people with numbers and equations. I do it all the time in my calculus classes, and that is when I am bending over backward to be as clear as I possibly can. Creationists are…
Remember that scene in Die Hard, where Bruce Willis drops a huge pile of explosives down an elevator shaft, blowing up the lobby of the building and killing a few terrorists, but also shattering the building’s huge glass windows? You might recall that right after he does that the officious deputy police chief says to…
Medicine
Have you heard of App.net? If not, check it out. The basic premise is to create a social media platform that is aligned with users’ interest. And so, gasp, it costs money! The CEO, Dalton Caldwell, has a neat video explaining the inception of the project and the philosophy of the venture. Critics have said…
In his non-book-review of Garret Keizer’s new book, Privacy, “Reason” Magazine correspondent includes this ill-informed quip on privacy: With regard to modern commerce, Mr. Keizer grumps: “We would do well to ask if the capitalist economy and its obsessions with smart marketing and technological innovation cannot become as intrusive as any authoritarian state.” Actually, no.…
Information exchange defines us as humans, and perhaps even as living things. In 2012, we’re approaching a whole new level. Greg Laden introduces us to Apple’s iBook, which handles images better than a generic eBook. Greg says “An iBook can be a product that has almost no writing in it at all, or it can…
Brain & Behavior
Studies of guppies show that bigger brains may mean “smarter” fish, but less offspring. Credit: Marrabbio2/Creative Commons …at least for guppies. Dr. Alexander Kotrschal and colleagues at Uppsala University (Sweden) either shrank or grew the brains of guppies over multiple generations to create animals with up to 8-10% variations in brain size. To test for “smartness” they had…
Researchers Sanchez et al. from the Gladstone Institute, University of California San Franciso and Washington University School of Medicine discovered that an FDA-approved anti-convulsant medication used to treat epilepsy (levetiracetam) can also reverse memory loss in addition to reducing other Alzheimer’s related symptoms in a mouse model of the disease. Alzheimer’s is currently the most common form of…
Researchers have discovered six people living in remote areas of Peru (Truenococha and Santa Marta) with natural antibodies against rabies despite never having received a vaccination for this deadly virus. They hypothesize that vampire bats actually transmitted small doses of the virus to people over time creating the natural antibodies. All six individuals reported having been exposed to the…
Technology
I am now using an iMac for a lot more than I ever used a Mac of any kind before, and in so doing I’m discovering some interesting software. I will therefore be telling you about it, because it is much more interesting than telling you about what I had for lunch or dinner. (Having…
I am making a couple of iBooks. I’ve already produced three of them, but you can’t see them because they were experimental and they have been mercifully deleted. I found three or four problems (mainly with my own design and understanding) that I’ll tell you a little about below. There are things to consider when…
The Curiosity rover / Mars Science Laboratory has landed safely on Mars and is returning data! So now we have two rovers on Mars again, Opportunity and a new one of unprecendented size and instrument sophistication. Curiosity has a laser gun that allows it to measure emission spectra at a distance, an instrument that allows…
Information Science
Information exchange defines us as humans, and perhaps even as living things. In 2012, we’re approaching a whole new level. Greg Laden introduces us to Apple’s iBook, which handles images better than a generic eBook. Greg says “An iBook can be a product that has almost no writing in it at all, or it can…
Confessions of a Science Librarian
Around the Web: Breaking up with ebooks, Blogging in the classroom and more
I’m breaking up with eBooks (and you can too) Ebooks Choices and the Soul of Librarianship Blogging in the classroom: why your students should write online The Last Future Uncovering the world’s ‘unseen’ science (preprint) HBO Rightly Decides Not to Cater to Cord Cutters In Virtual Play, Sex Harassment Is All Too Real High and…
G is for Galaxy: An Out of This World Alphabet (Alphabet Books) is one of a series of kid’s alphabet books with an interesting twist. The pages have the usual big letter, a picture of something that starts with that letter, and a short sentence or two referring to that word. But on the same…
Jobs
In the fall of 2011, a new Texas statute took effect against employers who engage in wage theft, putting in place real consequences for employers found guilty of stealing wages from workers. It was a big step forward in a state where wage theft has become as common as cowboy boots and pick-up trucks. It was especially good news for workers in El Paso, where wage theft has become so rampant that workers rights advocates have dubbed it an “epidemic.”
The Pump Handle
Houston, we have a workers’ rights problem: Profile of a worker justice center in Texas’ biggest city
Last month, more than 70 ironworkers walked off an ExxonMobil construction site near Houston, Texas. The workers, known as rodbusters in the industry, weren’t members of a union or backed by powerful organizers; they decided amongst themselves to unite in protest of unsafe working conditions in a state that has the highest construction worker fatality rate in the country.
Come work instead of me! Below is a posting for a 3-year contractually limited appointment in my unit. I’m chair of the search committee, so feel free to ask away with any questions about the position. I’ll answer them to the best of my ability given the limitations of being on the committee. As it…
