north carolina
lborkowski | August 23, 2012North Carolina's News & Observer has published a terrific in-depth series on “ghost policies” – inadequate workers’ compensation policies that save employers money but leave injured workers without the safety net they’re supposed to have. North Carolina requires employers with three or more employees to have workers’ compensation coverage, and general contractors often require coverage even for smaller firms. But a News & Observer investigation found that more than 30,000 businesses in the state lack the required coverage. Mandy Locke writes about one injured worker whose employer’s…
kcollins | July 30, 2010
The NC Science Festival will bring together more than 100 science-related events Sept. 11-26. Through science talks, hands-on activities, tours, performances and exhibits, North Carolina's science community will be on display to engage and inspire a new generation of scientists.
How will we engage our state in science? By showing citizens of our state science that is...
Diverse. Life is your lab...from age two to 122! Events on our festival schedule reflect the interests of all ages. Kids will get hands-on learning experiences, and adults will dive deep into current science topics with…
clock | July 6, 2010Our July Science Café (description below) will be held on Tuesday 7/20 at Tir Na Nog on S. Blount Street. With the disastrous BP Gulf oil spill now continuing into its third month, every day we are reminded of the challenges our country faces with regards to our energy production and consumption. Can nuclear energy be a viable answer for some of our energy needs? Our café speaker for the evening will be Dr. David McNelis, the Director of the Center for Sustainable Energy, Environment, and Economic Development at UNC's Institute for the Environment. It should be an interesting evening…
clock | July 5, 2010About a month ago, I told you about the book-reading event where Scott Huler (blog, Twitter, SIT interview) read from his latest book On The Grid (amazon.com). I read the book immediately after, but never wrote a review of my own. My event review already contained some of my thoughts about the topic, but I feel I need to say more, if nothing else in order to use this blog to alert more people about it and to tell everyone "Read This Book".
What I wrote last month,
"I think of myself as a reasonably curious and informed person, and I have visited at least a couple of infrastructure plants, but…
clock | July 1, 2010From the NCSU Libraries News:
The best in the world of science illustration will be hosted in a beautiful display featured in the D. H. Hill Library Special Collections Exhibit Gallery at North Carolina State University from June 14 through the first week in August. The Guild of Natural Science Illustrators (GNSI), founded at the Smithsonian Institution in 1968, is working with the NCSU Libraries to present "The Art in Science: Annual Exhibit of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators." Ranging from pen and ink drawings to the latest digital animations, the juried exhibit is a great chance…
clock | June 16, 20103rd PechaKucha Night event June 17th!
May 24, 2010--Raleigh, NC - Triangle PechaKucha is pleased to announce their third PechaKucha Night sponsored by Lonerider Beer, Relevance and Yelp!. The event will take place in Durham, NC, on June 17th, 2010, at 7:30 pm (doors open at 6:30). The event is free, but to attend you must register. Space is limited. Go here to register.
What is it? PechaKucha Nights are local idea-sharing events in the 20 x 20 format: speakers present 20 slides for 20 seconds per slide. Slides advance automatically to keep things moving forward at a rapid pace. Anyone can…
clock | June 7, 2010To get disclaimers out of the way, first, Vanessa Woods (on Twitter) is a friend. I first met her online, reading her blog Bonobo Handshake where she documented her day-to-day life and work with bonobos in the Congo. We met in person shortly after her arrival to North Carolina, at a blogger meetup in Durham, after which she came to three editions of ScienceOnline conference.
I interviewed Vanessa after the 2008 event and blogged (scroll down to the second half of the post) about her 2009 session 'Blogging adventure: how to post from strange locations'. At the 2010 conference, she was one of…
clock | June 6, 2010You may have heard that, about six months ago, Charlotte Observer and Raleigh News & Observer started a new Monday Science/Technology section.
Among other articles, there is also an ongoing weekly feature - a brief interview with a science blogger (usually, but not always, located in North Carolina), conducted by amazing and unique Delene Beeland (blog, Twitter).
Today was my turn (actually not - the blogger who was scheduled for this week had a good reason not to be interviewed in this particular week, and I was glad to help in a hurry).
You can now read the interview with me at…
clock | June 2, 2010Hi Café Friends,
Our June Science Café (description below) will be held on Tuesday 6/15 at the Irregardless Café on Morgan Street. Our café speaker for the evening will be Dr. Dianne Dunning from the NCSU School of Veterinary Medicine. Join us for a thought provoking discussion with Dr. Dunning about the relationships humans have with animals in our increasingly crowded world.
The Human-Animal Bond
Tuesday June 15, 2010
Time: 6:30 - 8:30 pm with discussions beginning at 7:00 followed by Q&A
Location: The Irregardless Café, 901 W. Morgan Street, Raleigh 833-8898
Animals touch our…
clock | June 1, 2010If you report, or just try to keep up to date, on research in this region, you know about RTI International. In 1958, it was the founding tenant of North Carolina's Research Triangle Park. Today it's one of the largest research institutes on the planet.
At 5:30 pm on Tuesday, June 8, RTI will welcome SCONC members to its 180-acre campus to learn about efforts to solve one of the world's most pressing challenges: the need to reengineer our energy use. Come and learn about efforts to create fuel from biomass, to remove sulfur and other bad actors from coal combustion and to use nanotechnology…
clock | May 31, 2010As I alerted you before, last night Scott Huler (blog, Twitter, SIT interview) did a reading from his latest book On The Grid (amazon.com) at the Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh.
The store was packed. The store sold out all the books before Scott was even done talking. The C-Span Book TV crew was there filming so the event will be on TV some day soon. Scott was also, earlier yesterday, on WUNC's The State Of Things (the podcast will soon be online here) and the day before that he was on KERA's Think with Krys Boyd (download MP3 podcast by clicking here).
Scott's energy and enthusiasm are…
clock | May 27, 2010Last night I went to the book reading of "On The Grid" by Scott Huler at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh. It was a great event. I wrote a more detailed summary over on Science In The Triangle.
clock | May 25, 2010Cory Doctorow, blogger at BoingBoing and author of several books, came to town last weekend and did a reading/signing of his latest novel For The Win at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill on Sunday.
I assume that, being bloggers and blog-readers, you all know who Cory is and what he does - if not, follow the links above as this post is going to be self-centered ;-)
This is the first time I got to meet Cory in person, but he is pretty important person in my life. After I have been blogging about politics for a couple of years and my blog started being well known in the circles of the progressive…
clock | May 11, 2010It is somewhat hard to grok how much a Big Deal the WWW2010 conference is when it's happening in one's own backyard. After all, all I had to do was drop the kids at school a little earlier each morning and drive down to Raleigh, through the familiar downtown streets, park in a familiar parking lot, and enter a familiar convention center, just to immediately bump into familiar people - the 'home team' of people I have been seeing at blogger meetups, tweetups and other events for years, like Paul Jones, Ruby Sinreich, Fred Stutzman, Ryan Boyles, Wayne Sutton, Kim Ashley, Henry Copeland and…
clock | May 11, 2010From the American Scientist:
If you can, join us at noon, Tuesday, May 25, here in Research Triangle Park for our final 2009-2010 American Scientist pizza lunch talk. (Don't worry, we'll start back up in the fall the way we always do.)
Our speaker will be Phaedra Boinodiris, a Serious Games Program Manager at IBM, where she helps craft IBM's serious games strategy in technical training, marketing and leadership development. She'll discuss: "Using Games to develop strategies and skills to thrive in a real-time world." Boinodiris is the founder of the INNOV8 program, a series of games focused…
clock | May 10, 2010Last week I attended the WWW2010 conference in Raleigh. I posted my summary of the event over on Science In The Triangle blog so check it out.
clock | May 10, 2010Vanessa Woods (website, old blog, new blog, Twitter) will be reading from her new book "Bonobo Handshake" (comes out May 27th - you can pre-order on amazon.com) at the Regulator in Durham on May 27th at 7pm, at Quail Ridge Books on June 9th at 7:30pm, and at Chapel Hill Borders on June 12th at 2pm.
I have interviewed Vanessa last year so you can learn more about her there.
I received a review copy recently and am halfway through. Once I finish I will post my book review here.
From Publishers Weekly:
Devoted to learning more about bonobos, a smaller, more peaceable species of primate than…
clock | May 9, 2010Scott Huler (blog, Twitter), the author of 'Defining the Wind', has a new book coming out this Tuesday. 'On The Grid' (amazon.com) is the story of infrastructure. For this book, Scott started with his own house (unlike me, Scott did the work) and traced where all those pipes, drains, cables and wires were coming from and going to, how does it all work, does it work well, where does it all come from historically, and how its current state of (dis)repair portends to the future.
You can read a review in Raleigh News & Observer, as well as an article by Scott in the same paper and another one…