Technology
chaoticutopia | April 5, 2007A while back, I asked for your input for a paper I was writing, concerning practical solutions for adapting to climate change. The paper was for a contest, which, unfortunately, I did not win. I'm sure others were more prepared to offer innovative solutions. I felt my paper made a good point, however, so I'm taking the opportunity to publish it here.
America, Adapt!
Leading our Country towards Sustainable Solutions
By Karmen Lee Franklin
Climate change is inevitable; this is obvious to anyone taking the time to examine the
multitude of evidence at hand. These changes, regardless of the…
jfiore | April 5, 2007With all of the recent content ragarding the DI and other purveyors of hokum, I thought it would be an appropriate time to post an entry from a pre-scienceblogs version of the Refuge.
...and pretty soon there won't be no streets
for dummies to jog on and doggies to dog on
religious fanatics can make it be all gone
I mean it won't blow up and disappear
it'll just look ugly for a thousand years
-Frank Zappa
Did you ever wonder what the world would be like today if Western culture had never suffered through the Dark Ages? What if, given the controls to some omnipotent time machine, we could…
tfk | April 5, 2007Taner Edis, a physicist at Truman State University, came to KU a couple days ago to talk about his research into creationism in the Muslim world. That research most recently led to his book An Illusion of Harmony: Science And Religion in Islam.
Dr. Edis grew up and went to college in Turkey, which is where a lot of modern Islamic creationism originates. Understanding why that should be the case, helps explain why sees claims of harmony between science and Islam as illusory.
A common trope in discussing the history of science relates to the era when science proceeded apace in the Islamic…
oracknows | April 5, 2007[Note: If you haven't already, you should read PART 1 of this two-part series. It defines several terms that I will be using in this post, and I don't plan on explaining them again, given that they were explained in detail in Part 1. Of course, if you're a medical professional and already know what lead time bias, length bias, and stage migration are, then you should still read Part 1 for its scintillating writing.]
I hadn't expected that it would take me this long to get around to part 2 of my post from Monday, but, alas, other matters intervened. Better late than never, and besides, we…
oracknows | April 2, 2007In the course of a few days last week, two prominent political personalities from different parties, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow and Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards, announced that their cancers (breast cancer in the case of Edwards and colon cancer in the case of Snow), after having apparently been successfully treated two years ago had recurred and were now metastatic. One of the issues that comes up whenever famous people announce that they have cancer is the question of early detection and why we don't detect tumors earlier. Indeed, Amy…
terrasig | March 31, 2007Leave it to the British to suggest bringing civility to blogging, specifically in blog comment threads, with a call for a suggested code of conduct. This follows blogger Kathy Sierra receiving vulgar and graphic death threats on her and others' blogs. (Kathy writes the techie blog, Creating Passionate Users.). As a result, Sierra canceled her appearances this week at a San Diego tech conference.
Citing a post from Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media, Inc. about this disturbing episode, Jack Schofield of the UK Guardian's Technology Blog notes that The Guardian has adopted a new comments policy…
evolgen | March 29, 2007Janet pointed me to a post at the Philosopher's Playground about doing away with laboratory courses in the science curriculum. Steve Gimbel, the philosopher doing the playing, teaches at Gettysburg College. He argues that the lab portions of science classes cause non-science majors to avoid those courses and not enroll in any science class not required for graduation. If science courses consisted of more theory and less labs (by theory he means lecture, and, by choosing that word, he indicates he doesn't have much experience in non-physics science courses where the lectures consist of more…
pharyngula | March 26, 2007There are a couple of events going on here in Morris this week that I'll be participating in, and that any of you in the region might find worth seeing. First, tonight:
Everyone is cordially invited to the last session of
THE 31st
MIDWEST PHILOSOPHY COLLOQUIUM
Personal Identity
Eric T. Olson
(Professor of Philosophy, University of Sheffield, UK)
Will present
"When Do We Begin and End?"
Monday, March 26, 7:30 p.m., Newman Catholic Center
306 East 4th Street, Morris
The gradual nature of development from fertilization to birth and beyond leaves it uncertain when we come into being; advances…
clock | March 21, 2007This is kinda funny. Waveflux digs out a couple of truly ancient articles - What Journalists Can Learn From Bloggers and What Bloggers Can Learn From Journalists by Steve Outing, which, though not as awful as some (especially the first one), still reveal (especially the second one) the basic misunderstanding of the blogging world in the way we have by now got used to (no editorial control, no accuracy, no money yada-yada-yada). But that was 2004 and one could be excused about not understanding something that was quite new at the time (hey, not THAT new - even I had a blog back in 2004 and I…
cmooney | March 14, 2007
Cyclone Indlala has intensified at "greater than climatological rate"--i.e., damn fast--and is now a Category 4 storm on its way to slam the northeastern coast of Madagascar (after further intensifying along the way).
I have been looking at the data on this storm from the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies at the University of Wisconsin, which uses a technology called the Advanced Dvorak Technique to estimate storm intensity from satellite images. On their latest update they had the storm's pressure down to 919.5 millibars and the wind speed up to 124.6 knots. (JTWC…
cmooney | March 13, 2007
As I noted previously on this blog, while in Vancouver I did a radio show on global warming in which one of many "skeptic" callers used the example of noted MIT oceanographer Carl Wunsch, and an alleged quotation from him, to cast doubt on the latest science. Having come across Wunsch's name several times in the context of working on Storm World, I was immediately suspicious that the caller was misrepresenting Wunsch, and in fact, eventually called him out on it.
Now I see (via the DeSmogBlog) that there's an addendum to all this. According to the Guardian, Wunsch is
....considering legal…
sb admin | March 11, 2007Honestly, I'm not sure where this list originated, but somebody came up with this list of "the most significant Science Fiction and Fantasy books of the last 50 years". I was having breakfast with some friends a couple of months ago, and we were musing about what should be in the "SF Canon". This is one person's list, and I suspect others would have other lists.
The in thing to do around here (based, at this writing, on the actions of Orac, PZ, John, Joseph, and Bora, is to post the list, posting in bold the ones that I've read.
Let's see how my nerd cred does:
1. The Lord of the Rings,…
bcohen | February 26, 2007The recent AAAS meeting, as has been well-blogged about, was on the theme of sustainability. In parallel, there were a series of sustainability related articles in the accompanying issue of Science that week (9 February 2007). One that caught my eye was about the growth increase in wind power in Europe over the past ten years.
(sources [top to bottom]: European Union; P. Runci, PNL; Gallagher et al., Ann. Rwv. Environ. Resour. 3 193 [2006])
Germany had negligible amounts in 1995; they now have close to 50,000 MW from wind "installed."
Daniel Clery writes:
Concern about carbon emissions and…
tfk | February 23, 2007Via ThinkProgress, Dick Cheney tells ABCNews:
I think there’s an emerging consensus that we do have global warming. You can look at the data on that, and I think clearly we’re in a period of warming. Where there does not appear to be a consensus, where it begins to break down, is the extent to which that’s part of a normal cycle versus the extent to which it’s caused by man, greenhouse gases, et cetera.
Cheney is understating both points. The IPCC SPM does not say that there is an emerging consensus on global warming, it says "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident…
drorzel | February 22, 2007My father taught sixth grade in the public schools for thirty-odd years, and always griped about the teacher training workshops that they were periodically subjected to, in which some expert would be brought in to talk about the wonders of the latest fad in pedagogy, while all the teachers in the school struggled to stay awake.
I'm sure he'll be amused to know that the same thing happens at the college level, where Laurence Musgrave is cranky about faculty development workshops on teaching with technology. This bit ought to sound familiar to, well, anybody in academia:
[O]ne of the reasons I'…
bcohen | February 20, 2007For example, I knew you would click on that.
Oh how coy.
Anyway, an article in The Guardian ("The brain scan that can read people's intentions") reports on this: "A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person's brain and read their intentions before they act."
A picture of Dave's brain on drugs
(ibuprofen, if I'm reading the scan correctly)
Quoth those Brits:
The latest work reveals the dramatic pace at which neuroscience is progressing, prompting the researchers to call for an urgent debate into the ethical issues…
clock | February 18, 2007
Robotic Cameras Join Search For 'Holy Grail Of Bird-watching':
In the bayous of eastern Arkansas, amidst ancient trees both living and dead that provide nourishment to creatures of the swamp, hangs a high-tech sentinel patiently waiting to capture video of an elusive bird once thought to be extinct. Developed by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Texas A&M University, the high-resolution intelligent robotic video system installed in the Bayou DeView area of the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas is part of a major effort to locate the ivory-billed…
sb admin | February 16, 2007By David Michaels
The changes President Bush made last month to Executive Order 13422, requiring, among other things, that certain agency guidance documents be reviewed by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), within the Office of Management and Budget, has caused a great deal of consternation in the public health community. (Weâve written about it here and here and here.)
Fortunately, the new congress has begun to examine the potential impact of the changes in the regulatory process. Earlier this week, the House Science and Judiciary Committees held back to back hearings…
oracknows | February 16, 2007Like most people, I like making money. True, it's not the main goal of my life (otherwise I definitely wouldn't be in academics), but, all in all, it's better to be comfortably off than to be poor. And, as I've said before, although I could make more in private practice, I don't do too badly as an academic surgeon. I can afford a decent house, a nice car, computers, and gadgets, and still save for retirement. Of course, key to that is not spending beyond my means, as some at my income level somehow still manage to do, but wouldn't it be nice if you could access forces and powers that would--…
sb admin | February 13, 2007By Liz Borkowski
Earlier today, the House of Respresentatives Committee on Science and Technology held a hearing on President Bushâs amendements to Executive Order 12866, and three of the witnesses painted a dismal picture of regulation under these new rules. (The fourth, William Kovacs of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, suggested that small businesses are drowning under regulations and the new requirements are needed to stem the tide.) David Michaels and Celeste Monforton have also written here about why this new order is problematic.
Bushâs amended executive order is the latest version of an…