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grrlscientist | January 31, 2007The 31st edition of the Carnival of the Liberals is now available for your reading pleasure. This blog carnival publishes only the ten top choices, so you are getting the cream of the crop of submissions, which I am told, was substantial this time. Of particular interest in this issue is a story that tells us the sorts of loaded questions we should be asking Barack Obama.
tags: blog carnival, Liberals, politics
grrlscientist | January 31, 2007Tangled Bank is now available -- and on my birdday, too. How much better can things get, eh?
For those of you who appreciate good science writing, this is the blog carnival for you! It is jam-packed with science-y goodness, including one entry from me (I sent them approximately 12 entries, but they decided to accept only one entry per blog -- bummer for me -- so you should go there and figure out which one they ultimately accepted).
tags: blog carnival, Tangled Bank
cmcclain | January 31, 2007Researchers report that an approach used for years to understand the structure of Earth's oceanic crust is flawed and geoscientists will have reconsider the correspondence between seismic data and rock units when mapping formations of young oceanic crust.
More at Press Zoom...
tqa | January 30, 2007I always find it a bit amusing when someone who is exceptionally good at identifying (and mercilessly mocking) stupidity in certain circumstances turns out to be totally oblivious to his own stupidity. That's exactly the case when it comes to Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame). He's gone off the deep end when it comes to evolution before, and now he's at it again. I'm not going to try to identify all of the problems with his latest attempt. Instead, I'll just pick a couple of the more spectacularly stupid remarks.
Consider the simple act of picking up a pencil. It requires your brain and your…
tqa | January 30, 2007Walter ReMine (an anti-evolutionist who ardently believes that "Haldane's Dilemma" is a real problem for evolution) recently updated the entry for "Haldane's Dilemma" at the CreationWiki. The update does not directly refer to my recent posts on the topic, but does address the points that I made. Actually, "address" is probably the wrong word - he provides a hand-waving dismissal without actually responding to any of the specific points I raised. Ordinarily, a hand-waving response isn't worth the effort needed to write a reply, but in this case the errors that ReMine makes are worth discussing…
tqa | January 30, 2007An interesting comment about open access has been left over at Bora's place. The commenter is clearly not in favor of open access, and provides a number of reasons for her opposition. I'm going to break the comment into a couple of parts, and address all of the objections separately.
OPEN ACCESS isn't FREE. That's what any first year econ student will tell you. I don't know why scientists can't get that. Open access is free to the reader. It still costs money to publish. Open access shifts that cost to the author.
That means the author has to:
a) pull money out of his grant to pay…
grrlscientist | January 30, 2007
In Juneau, Alaska, an ambitious bald eagle had apparently found a deer head in the local dump and was carrying it away when the bird crashed into nearby power lines, causing a power outage for approximately 10,000 people.
Unfortunately, the eagle did not survive.
Cited story.
Image source.
tags: bald eagle, Juneau Alaska, power outage
tqa | January 30, 2007Over the last couple of days, quite a number of articles have been posted here at Scienceblogs commenting on the for-profit academic publishing community's most recent efforts to fight mandatory open access to government science. The industry group representing the major publishers of academic journals in the US hired a well-known DC public relations attack dog to help them with their efforts. If these folks are worried enough to bay several hundred thousand dollars for his help, they clearly think that they have a lot to lose. Let's look at just what that might be.
I'm going to do this in…
nisbetmc | January 30, 2007Over the weekend I spotlighted a Washington Post article on the Association of American Publishers' hiring of the "PR Pit Bull" to frame their attacks on free access to federally-financed research articles. The Post article noted the perception problems caused by consulting with Eric Dezenhall, who's former clients include Exxon Mobile and Jeffrey Skilling of Enron fame. As things go from bad to worse for the industry trade group, the journal Nature has more to add to these details. Here's a sample:
From e-mails passed to Nature, it seems Dezenhall spoke to employees from Elsevier, Wiley…
petnoyer | January 30, 2007The Bush Administration announced major budget increases totaling more than $140 million over the fiscal year 2007 request "to support coastal and marine conservation efforts in fiscal year 2008." The press release announcing this new funding can be found here.
Highlights include:
* $123 million to NOAA for sustainable use of ocean resources ($25 million), protection and restoration of marine and coastal areas ($38 million), and enhanced ocean science and research ($60 million).
* $25 million to NSF and USGS to implement the Ocean Research Priority Plan (ORPP), with $3 million of…
tqa | January 29, 2007In 1862, the British philosopher Herbert Spencer used the phrase "survival of the fittest" to describe Darwin's concept of natural selection. It's not a bad phrase, really, and it doesn't do a bad job of describing natural selection - the individuals in any population that are "fittest" - best suited to reproduce - are the ones most likely to reproduce successfully. If this is correct (and it is), we can expect that "fitness" would be a very important concept in evolutionary biology. It is, of course, and John Wilkins has already provided a good explanation of the concept in general. I'm…
pharyngula | January 29, 2007Everyone should congratulate ScienceWoman—she manage to land a 7 pound minnow.
pharyngula | January 29, 2007Read Twisty and Amanda for an encouraging story about how community activism can shut down a sleazebag operation, "Girls Gone Wild". It's a good lesson that I hope gets spread far and wide, and leads more people to cut off exploiters like Joe Francis.
grrlscientist | January 29, 2007Some of you, my readers, have sent money to me via Paypal or Amazon. I just wanted to tell you that even though most of these funds have been dedicated to keeping my birds and me housed and fed and me medicated, I did spend a little of it on a gift that I know all of you would want to have given me; a year's subscription to NewScientist and ScienceNews magazines.
When I was gainfully employed, I had subscriptions to both of these magazines and not a week has gone by that I haven't missed reading them since my subscriptions ran out a couple years ago. But thanks to you, my first issue of…
cmcclain | January 28, 2007
[Note from Craig: The following is by a close friend and colleague, Jeff Nekola. I invited Jeff along for a day out at sea. I thought it would be interesting, and a new perspective, for Jeff to tell you about field work for deep-sea biologist.]
My field time is mostly spent looking at snails living in soil in a wide range of terrestrial habitats. Over the last decade I have conducted field work at over 1100 sites across North America, ranging from the subtropical bay thickets of the Gulf Coast to the taiga of central Quebec across the Midwest to the shores of Hudson's Bay at Churchill…
tqa | January 28, 2007I've got a strange feeling that this answer is going to be, by far, the most common one among the Sciencebloggers:
What Kind of Reader Are You?
Your Result: Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
You're probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading. You are one of the literati. Other people's grammatical mistakes make you insane.
Dedicated Reader
Literate Good Citizen
Book Snob
Non-Reader
Fad Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You?Create Your Own Quiz
(Via GrrlScientist)
cmcclain | January 28, 2007A reader recently asked me for recommendations for books about the deep appropriate for children. Here is my running list and we'll have Peter (who actually has child instead of being one) provide some recommendations in a later post.
One of my favorites is The Deep-Sea Floor by Collard. Great text that is accessible for even young children. The wonderful illustrations by Wenzel help to children visualize the environment. I often hand this out as a gift. Collard also has In the Deep Sea, that I have not seen but should be has excellent as his other.
Another fantastic book is Diving To A…
grrlscientist | January 28, 2007The Personal Development blog carnival is now available. I am not sure how I was included in this carnival, but I am glad that I was!
grrlscientist | January 28, 2007I ran across a quiz that identifies what sort of book reader you are. My own results are below the fold and I hope that you share yours with me too, along with your opinion of the questions they used;
There was one question that bothered me. It was question six; Which set of books have you read ALL of? It turns out that I have read all the books listed except one in all of the answers provided.
What Kind of Reader Are You?
Your Result: Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
Â
You're probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading. You are one…
grrlscientist | January 27, 2007Yesterday, I received a rejection letter from the clinic I was trying to set up "after care" with -- so .. not only do I receive rejection letters from every job I've applied for, but now I am receiving rejection letters from shrinks! This means that I have no way to obtain the meds that I am supposed to take, which means I get to go through some really serious withdrawal symptoms or I can set out on a special adventure to the ER obtain a few days of these drugs. Going to a city hospital ER means I get to;
spend 26 hours in the psych ER
be strip-searched
be searched with a metal detector…