science

Don?t Feel Sorry For Spirit Here’s another take on the previous sob story. And here’s what’s really going on. [Via Alan Boyle]
Post Date:02/02/2010 23:44:34
www.transterrestrial.com

Nancy Pelosi Conference call on HCR: She was confident a bill will get passed and it's up to the Sen DOWNLOADS: 281 PLAYS: 71 Nancy Pelosi held a conference call today on health care and spent about 30 minutes discussing what's happening now and taking Q's. (I think it's important to get these conference calls up to our readers.) The HOUSE does not trust the Senate and will not move forward unless Harry Reid gets the Senate rolling first. She's not alone. The Senate has lost the trust of the American people completely. She reaffirmed that the Senate bill has no chance of passing the HOUSE as is. Brian writes: Pelosi has insisted for some time now that the Senate health care bill can not pass the House unamended, but that she can probably round up the votes if the Senate and the House both pass a sidecar bill making a number of pre-emptive changes to it. "Don't even ask us to consider passing the Senate bill until the other l
Post Date:02/02/2010 18:39:00
feeds.feedburner.com

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Post Date:02/01/2010 11:16:40
10e.org

The wisdom of Solomon A quick post for commentary on the new Solomon et al paper in Science express. We’ll try and get around to discussing this over the weekend, but in the meantime I’ve moved some comments over. There is some commentary on this at DotEarth, and some media reports on the story – some good, some not so good. It seems like a topic that is ripe for confusion, and so here are a few quick clarifications that are worth making. First of all, this is a paper about internal variability of the climate system in the last decade, not on additional factors that drive climate. Second, this is a discussion about stratospheric water vapour (10 to 15 km above the surface), not water vapour in general. Stratospheric water vapour comes from two sources – the uplift of tropospheric water through the very cold tropical tropopause (both as vapour and as condensate), and the oxidation of methane in the upper stratosphere (CH4+2O2 –> CO2 + 2H2O NB: this is just a schematic, the act
Post Date:01/29/2010 19:28:32
www.realclimate.org

A snippet of scorn As I'm writing and endlessly revising my job talk for this coming week, I've come across some gems from the archives that I know some of my women scientist readers in particular will enjoy. I may share others, but this anecdote is particularly galling to me right now.In part of my talk I'll examine ranch owner and businesswoman Susanna Bixby Bryant, who founded the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden on part of her ranch property between Los Angeles and Riverside. Bryant wanted to create an arboretum of native Californian flora, and she wanted it to be both comprehensible to the public and useful to scientists. California's botanists were thrilled to have a wealthy landowner demonstrate such support for a botanical project, but some were not so enthusiastic about letting the public tramp around the garden. How bad was their scorn? Pretty bad. Willis Linn Jepson--you may know him from the Jepson Manual if you've ever botanized in the American west--had this to say in a 1929 letter when
Post Date:01/26/2010 21:52:00
cluttermuseum.blogspot.com

let?s have a little sanity from the democrats? A
Post Date:01/24/2010 17:01:09
orgtheory.wordpress.com

Trends in Ecology and Ecosystem Services In response to my recent post on the growth in research on Ecosystem Services, Mark Neff from the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes at Arizona State University writes: You?re right that there has been significant growth in number of publications about ecosystem services, and that is a noteworthy trend. Although it does not directly map [...] Related posts:Growth of ecosystem services concept Scenarios for Ecosystem Services a Special Feature in Ecology and Society Nonlinearity produces management opportunites for ecosystem services
Post Date:01/24/2010 13:29:23
rs.resalliance.org

Thanks for all the fish As if to exact revenge for my using its brethren as a metaphor and allegory in a recurring dream, one of my fancy goldfish today insisted on swimming upside down.Which, even if you've never owned a goldfish, you know isn't a good thing.But it enriches the metaphor. Piggy's upside-down antics first sent me into a suck of despair--I can't stand to see animals suffering, or appearing to suffer--and then to the web, where I learned (and here's where the metaphor gets enriched exponentially) that upside-down swimming is not necessarily a sign of imminent death.It's usually constipation.So I spent the morning learning about how to make a goldfish poop, and then anxiously waiting for said poop and for Piggy to just start swimming upright dammit.Piggy, in her hospital bowl--uprightAnd if you're ever in the market for goldfish laxatives? The secret is shelled peas.
Post Date:01/23/2010 22:39:00
cluttermuseum.blogspot.com

Storm basin A couple weeks ago when I walked by the local storm basin a few blocks from my house, I noticed that the water levels were way down, with many large islands showing. Today I happened by there and wow! what a difference a storm makes. These photos aren't taken from the same location, but they give some idea of the change in water level. (They're taken with my iPhone, so the quality's not too great.)Before:Before:After (click to embiggen--it's pretty!):
Post Date:01/23/2010 20:54:00
cluttermuseum.blogspot.com

orgtheory quiz #3: andorran politics A
Post Date:01/19/2010 21:39:28
orgtheory.wordpress.com

Ambient informatics through the rearview mirror In 1998 I was nearing completion of the grad program at Georgia Tech in Information Design and Technology (now called Digital Media), cutting my teeth in the theory and practice that I use to this day. But some of it, like the project below for a course in Human-Computer Interaction taught by Greg Abowd (basically this class), only seems really meaningful nearly 12 years on. Sonopticon was a team project to build a prototype of an automobile-based ambient sensing and heads-up display. We didn't have to build a car that knew its surroundings -- this was HCI, after all -- but we did have to explore the issues of what it would be like from a driver's perspective. My wife and I took the car out one day (this is how you do anything in Atlanta) and filmed scenarios for later editing in After Effects. The RealVideo files (!) are gone, but some screenshots still exist, which I have strung together below. It's laughable, really, the quality and overlays, but it conveys some interesting
Post Date:01/19/2010 21:10:49
www.ascentstage.com

Science Online 2010 Thoughts This year's Science Online conference at the Research Triangle Park, NC was a satisfying experience.I had the pleasure of meeting face to face for the first time people I have gotten to know quite well over the blogosphere: Steve Koch, Hope Leman, Walter Jessen, Pawel Szcz?sny and Andy Farke. This is probably the best conference for me to catch up with friends and collaborators - Bill Hooker, Tony Williams, Cameron Neylon, Deepak Singh, Carmen Drahl, Dorothea Salo, Christina Pikas and several others.My session on Second Life Saturday didn't work out so well. We had major connectivity problems both at the conference side (bandwidth maxing out and even the router getting unplugged at one point!) and on Second Life. We spent quite a bit of time before the session trying to get things under control but SL voice failed for everyone there after working briefly. I also got kicked out repeatedly and had trouble teleporting. I did manage to follow Max Chatnoir to her always impressive Geno
Post Date:01/19/2010 16:36:00
usefulchem.blogspot.com

2010 Science and Engineering Indicators: Do attendance gaps in science and technology museums also l Despite increasing levels of informal education aimed at communicating with the U.S. public about nanotechnology, recent studies have shown that there has not been much change in the overall level of nanotechnology knowledge reported by public opinion surveys.  Yet, most of these studies have explored the changes in knowledge levels for the public as a whole without analyzing the differences across different types of publics. Data from Chapter 7 of the National Science Board's Science and Engineering Indicators 2010 (published just a few days ago) now suggest that we may be in the middle of a widening rift between different groups of citizens: those with lower levels of formal education and those who go to college.  Education-based knowledge gaps can be expected for a number of reasons. Most importantly, comparisons between the 2008 and 2010 Science and Engineering Indicators (based on data collections in 2006 and 2008, respectively) show that the percentage of Americans wit
Post Date:01/19/2010 16:23:00
nanopublic.blogspot.com

Kepler's world view Johannes Kepler was one of the greatest scientists of all time. He rose from humble beginnings, and had a hard time getting financial support throughout his career, but, probably more than any other person, even Galileo, was responsible for our current view of the arrangement of the solar system. I recently read Tycho and Kepler - The Unlikely Partnership That Forever Changed Our Understanding of the Heavens, by Kitty Ferguson. (New York: Walker and Company, 2002.) It was a longish book, with a lot of history, but I found it well worth the reading.The first part of the book was mostly about Tycho Brahe. I won't add much to the one-sentence (if that much) that he gets in science courses, namely "he made very accurate observations of the movement of the planets, which were useful in overthrowing the geocentric view of the solar system," or something like that. I will say that Ferguson makes clear that these accurate observations were obtained purposefully, and that Brahe had to develop h
Post Date:01/17/2010 01:52:00
sunandshield.blogspot.com

election through network A
Post Date:01/15/2010 09:21:24
orgtheory.wordpress.com

U.S. public faces widening information gap on nanotechnology A new piece by ASU's Elizabeth Corley and myself, just published in The Scientist, uses national data sets tracking the exact same knowledge questions over time to show that there are widening gaps in nanotech knowledge among different groups of the public, based on formal education levels.  This directly contradicts what keeps being repeated as a mantra among most academic scholars, policy makers (both in the US and UK), and outreach specialists in the nano community, i.e., that the public is unaware of nanotechnology and uninformed.  Our data show that this unidimensional view is not only incorrect, but that these misperceptions will guide outreach efforts that will be ineffective, especially among already disadvantaged groups of society.In other words, most commonly-shared beliefs about what people know about nanotechnology are simplistic at best, and largely based on the fact that so far we have not adequately explored the complex dynamics of how people learn about nanote
Post Date:01/11/2010 13:32:00
nanopublic.blogspot.com

Toy train used to calibrate fusion reactor While Princeton University's National Spherical Torus Experiment was shut down for improvements over the winter break, scientists and engineers availed themselves of the opportunity to recalibrate the reactor's neutron sensors. To do so, they assembled a circular toy train track around the torus and ran a toy locomotive carrying a chunk of neutron-emitting californium-252 along it for three days. The New York Times explains: A stationary neutron source was previously used for the calibration, but that did not fully capture how the neutrons bounced around. Putting the californium on the moving train improved the accuracy by about a factor of 10, Dr. Ono said. [Thanks, Pete!] Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Science | Digg this!
Post Date:01/08/2010 15:12:51
www.hackszine.com

Dissecting a Human
Post Date:01/06/2010 19:32:00
luponfirehouse.blogspot.com

Recession helps museum attendance ... and it may matter for informal science outreach Last year, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) released fairly pessimistic overview data of attendance at art museums in the U.S.  35% of U.S. adults overall (about 78 million people) attended an art museum or an arts performance in 2008. On the plus side, this is much higher than attendance of science or natural history museums, of course, which  hovered below 40% for college graduates in 2006 and below 10% for folks without a high school diploma. But the bad news -- back in 2009 -- was the fact that attendance had been on the decline for a while:""A new study from the National Endowment for the Arts finds a notable decline in theater, museum and concert attendance and other "benchmark" cultural activities between 2002 and 2008 for adults 18 and older, and a sharper fall from 25 years ago. The drop was for virtually all art forms and for virtually all age groups and levels of education." (click here for the full AP story.)"Surprisingly, the largest drop in arts consump
Post Date:01/03/2010 04:32:00
nanopublic.blogspot.com

Researchers Crack GSM Cell Phone Security Hackers could soon be listening to your cellphone call. That's the word from the Chaos Communication Conference in Berlin, an annual get-together for hackers. Cryptographers at the conference say they've been able to crack a code that, on a normal day, prevents the interception of mobile phone calls by forcing those phones to consistently change frequencies across a list of about eighty channels.Read more ...Source: www.infopackets.com
Post Date:12/29/2009 18:57:00
www.pok-kam.com