PSA
oracknows | October 6, 2016A frequent topic of discussion on this blog is the concept of overdiagnosis. It’s a topic I’ve been writing about regularly since around 2007 or so and is defined as the detection in an asymptomatic person of disease that, if left alone, would never progress to endanger that person’s life or well-being within his or her lifetime. The problem with overdiagnosis is that it pretty much always leads to overtreatment, the treatment of overdiagnosed disease that is not health- or life-threatening. The key shortcoming in our knowledge that leads to overtreatment is that, once we detect disease with…
oracknows | April 8, 2013One of the more depressing things about getting much more interested in the debate over how we should screen for common cancers, particularly breast and prostate cancer, is my increasing realization of just how little physicians themselves understand about the complexities involved in weighing the value of such tests. It's become increasingly apparent to me that most physicians believe that early detection is always good and that it always saves lives, having little or no conception of lead time or length bias. A couple of weeks ago, I saw another example of just this phenomenon in the form…
grrlscientist | March 18, 2010tags: public service announcement, Sussex Safer Roads Partnership, seatbelts, automobiles, vehicles, safety, safer roads, Embrace Life, streaming video
This is a very touching public service announcement (PSA) by the Sussex Safer Roads Partnership, asking people to always wear their seatbelts when in a moving vehicle. Is there an Academy Award for PSAs? If so, this one deserves to be nominated!
sb admin | December 8, 2009From the American Geophysical Union's Twitter feed ( @theAGU ):
Looking for a geoblogger to discuss blogging at Communicating your Science workshop Sunday Dec. 13 morning #AGU09 Contact mjvinas@agu.org
(I'm not going. Have fun in San Francisco - I'll be at home, grading.)
khannula | December 8, 2009From the American Geophysical Union's Twitter feed ( @theAGU ):
Looking for a geoblogger to discuss blogging at Communicating your Science workshop Sunday Dec. 13 morning #AGU09 Contact mjvinas@agu.org
(I'm not going. Have fun in San Francisco - I'll be at home, grading.)
khannula | October 30, 2009Jess is looking for posts about outreach that we've done. I'd like to talk about outreach that other people have done.
This month, many of the bloggers here at Sb have been participating in Donors Choose, a campaign to raise money for schools. October is a crazy month for anyone who goes to the Geological Society of America meeting, so I teamed up with Highly Allochthonous and Eruptions in the hope that, between the three blogs, we'd be able to scare up some support for K-12 geoscience education.
October's over tomorrow, and the geobloggers' challenge has raised more money than any other…
khannula | October 24, 2009The DonorsChoose social media challenge ends tomorrow at the end of next week. Rumor has it that HP has a large pot of money (like $200,000) to split amongst the groups that raised at least 1% of the total... and they'll split the money at the end of the day tomorrow. If we raised that 1% of the total, HP would donate another $2000 towards the projects that we suggest. As of tonight, the Geobloggers challenge has raised $2215. The total amount raised, amongst all the bloggers and tweeters and others, is $282,116. So we're $600 short of giving a lot more money to engage kids in the Earth…
khannula | October 4, 2009My other half sent me this link on Friday: from Wired, rating weapons used to kill zombies (in Zombieland, and elsewhere). Their number 13:
13. Rock hammers
Not to be confused with tremendous mallets, these things are faster to wield and don't leave you exhausted after two or three swings. Used for busting rocks, they can easily be repurposed to bust zombies.Advantages: Combines all the best qualities of the 1911A1 and the pump-action shotgun.Disadvantages: None. Anyone who suggests otherwise eats babies.
The e-mail reminded me about one of the projects from the Geobloggers DonorsChoose…
khannula | September 24, 2009Over the past year, as live-blogging and live-tweeting conferences have become more common, scientific societies have had to figure out what to do about bloggers. What are we? We don't usually wear press badges (although there are professional journalists who blog, and there are bloggers who write about new research in a way that's similar to traditional science journalists). We're just some people sitting in the back of a darkened room, listening to a talk... until we post publicly about it. Last summer, my SciBling Dan MacArthur unintentially ran afoul of the press policy at the Cold Spring…
khannula | September 21, 2009I confess that I didn't know the geological conventions for abbreviating time until I started teaching the geology writing class and looked them up. (That's despite having published a paper on argon-argon geochronology. Sometimes, just doing whatever the co-authors and reviewers say is the right thing to do...) So I don't have any strong opinions about how to abbreviate lengths of time. But if you do, the Geological Society of America wants to know.
Short version: traditionally, geologists have used different abbreviations for ages (time before present) and duration (amount of time elapsing…
khannula | August 20, 2009Anne Jefferson, a hydro-geomorpho-climate geologist at UNC-Charlotte, has officially joined Highly Allochthonous as Chris Rowan's co-blogger. Anne's been unofficially co-blogging there for a while, but it's great to see her role made more official. And it's especially great to see someone with expertise in water and surface processes on Sb.
(Anne and I are also working together on a survey about women geoscientists and blogs - if you haven't taken it, please check it out.)
khannula | August 18, 2009Geobloggers (and tweeters) are very social, but we often exist in our own world apart from the rest of the science bloggers. Here are some opportunities to remind the rest of the science-blogging world how cool we are:
1st: ScienceOnline 2010 is a conference devoted to science on Web 2.0 and to open-access science. This year's version will be held January 15-17, 2010, in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina. Some of the proposed sessions include "blogging (tweeting, sharing photos, etc) from the field," "Arctic/Antarctic blogging," and "nature blogging." I figure geobloggers do more…
khannula | July 29, 2009Earth Science Week 2009 will be October 11-17 (ending on the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake!). This year's theme is "Understanding Climate." There are photo, visual arts, and essay contests, and Thursday is going to be the first "Women in Geosciences" day. (And then Friday will be "frantically put posters together for GSA" day. Maybe the people who prefer AGU can make this year's Earth Science Week happen...)
The Association for Women Geoscientists has a new website (at the old address). They're now collecting dues online, but the transition to a paperless world has been…
khannula | July 28, 2009Last month, another structural geologist came to town to check out possible sites for a future field class. While we were out looking at one of my favorite teaching sites, he commented that geologists seem unusually willing to share their secrets with one another. (We had met at one of the Cutting Edge workshops, where great teaching ideas are free for the taking, technically unpublished but shared online and in person.)
A few weeks ago, I learned about another example: Outcropedia, a project of the International Union of Geosciences' TekTask group. From the organizers' e-mail:
The…
khannula | July 8, 2009Five students (three from the US, two from Brazil) were arrested last month while doing paleoclimate research in Brazil. They were collecting sediment cores from lakes and wetlands, in order to understand past climate change in western Brazil. The charges were based on Brazilian laws dealing with unauthorized extraction of mineral resources. (The group had research permits which they believed to be valid, but apparently they did not cover all members of the group.) The students have been released on bail, but the American students have to stay in Brazil until the legal process is complete -…
khannula | June 17, 2009Science has an award for online education resources (cutely named "SPORE"), and they want nominations by June 30.
Here are their criteria:Rules of Eligibility for SPORE-2009:
* The project must focus on science education.
* The resources described must be freely available on the Internet.
* The project can be targeted to students or teachers at the precollege or college level, or it can serve the informal education needs of the general public.
* The Internet resources must be in English or include an English translation.
* Nominations are welcome from all sources. Both…
khannula | May 13, 2009Ok, you're probably thinking. Now she's really lost it. California's got earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, coastal erosion, oil, gold, sinking ground, a funky inland delta with levees in danger of failing, major water issues... and that's not even getting into the really cool stuff, like serpentinites and blueschists and pillow basalts and forearc basin sediments and granodiorites.
Yeah. California's got plenty of geology, and plenty of problems related to its geology. And college-bound high school kids don't study it, because very few high school earth science classes count for admission…
khannula | March 7, 2009Cr!key Creek invites bloggers to join him on World Water Day, March 22, and post about water basins and aquifers that cross political boundaries.
Here's what he said:
There are hundreds of water basins and aquifers that straddle our political boundaries, at both international and national levels. Neighbours stick their own straws into the same glass. This has historically led to both conflict and cooperation.
"Over the last 60 years there have been more than 200 international water agreements and only 37 cases of reported violence between states over water."
In the spirit of World Water…
khannula | March 6, 2009Earth is going to be here for the foreseeable future. Will there be geoscientists to help everyone else figure out how to deal with it?
The people who organize the Cutting Edge geoscience teaching workshops have another set of workshops, aimed at helping geoscience departments figure out how to grow and stay vibrant. This is particularly challenging for the geosciences, because we're on both sides of environmental issues. Our majors might end up looking for oil and gas or for ore deposits, or might monitor and clean up pollution. Our departments are also the place where college students learn…
sb admin | November 16, 2007
Anti-drug ad parody that's also an anti-drug ad itself. This is Your Brain on Heroin: Any Questions?.