Blogging
retrospectacle | November 29, 2007Worrisome news: A Cairo human rights activist and blogger, Wael Abbas, posted videos of torture by Egyptian police on YouTube. YouTube received some "complaints" about the material and responded by suspending Abbas' account there, citing his material was "inappropriate." One of these videos depicted the sodomy of a restrained political prisoner by police, and resulted in the conviction of the police officers involved.
"It's the first time Egyptian people saw something like that," Abbas said, referring to beatings and torture. "It was a shock to the Egyptian people."
The blogger, who said he'…
clock | November 28, 2007A milestone for Abel PharmBoy and Happy Birthday to Olduvai George!
Chris asks: how to get alienated kids from inner cities interested in nature?
This year saw a sharp rise in the number of multi-author scientific papers. This reflects the increasingly collaborative nature of science - no more crazy loners tinkering in their basements. Thus, a better system for assessing scientific contributions (at least as it pertains to publication of research) is becoming more urgent.
This Saturday is the World AIDS Day. Will you blog about it?
10 top researchers in the area of adolescent health,…
clock | November 23, 2007...the computers and the Web:
If you are not clear about the difference between the Net (aka Internet), the Web (aka World Wide Web) and the Graph (aka Social Graph), then this post is a must read (via Ed). He explains much more clearly what I had in mind before, e.g., here.
In order to use the Net, the Web and the Graph, you do need some kind of a machine, perhaps a computer, and Greg Laden puts together a dream (or nighthmare) setup for you!
Speaking of dream computers, I could not resist... as you may have seen before, Professor Steve Steve and I got to play with the XO laptop back at…
aardvarchaeology | November 21, 2007Blog carnivals!
The twenty-eighth Four Stone Hearth is on-line at Hot Cup of Joe. Archaeology and anthropology to a most awe-inspiring extent.
The next open 4SH hosting slot is already on 5 29 December. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me. No need to be an anthro pro -- come as you are. And do it NOW.
A very fine Skeptics' Circle may be found at Med Journal Watch. So fine, in fact, that I am on it despite forgetting to submit! Thanks Chris!
And all you biology types, check out the latest Tangled Bank at From Archaea to Zeaxanthol.
clock | November 21, 2007It's been a while since I came back from Boston, but the big dinosaur story kept me busy all last week so I never managed to find time and energy to write my own recap of the Harvard Conference.
Anna Kushnir, Corie Lok, Evie Brown, Kaitlin Thaney (Part 2 and Part 3) and
Alex Palazzo have written about it much better than I could recall from my own "hot seat". Elizabeth Cooney of Boston Globe has a write-up as well. Read them all.
So, here is my story, in brief....and pictorial, just like the first part (under the fold).
The Keynote
About an hour or so before the conference, we started…
clock | November 20, 2007An article in Wired Campus (which I guess is a blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education) quotes something I wrote in this post about the Carnegie Mellon analysis of Top 100 most useful blogs. Thanks ae and Sandy for the heads-up.
sciencewoman | November 19, 2007Kate has announced a great topic for the next Scientiae. She'd like us to "transcend the debate." She says:
I'm tired of arguing whether women are really screwed or not in science, I'm tired of discussion biological or cultural differences between male and female aptitude; there's something problematic about these dichotomies that makes the arguments stale. Instead:
* What are the ways you transcend these debates?
* How do you think about the big picture?
* How do you do the work that you do, how do you move on?
* What does your life look like in this context?
* Where do…
retrospectacle | November 19, 2007In the fair use story that just won't die, my internet romp over the use of a figure from the Journal of Science of Food and Agriculture was mentioned in this story on Newsweek now. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, this article in The Scientist describes that incident factually. The Newsweek story's main focus, however, is a small dust up where a book published by Wiley appeared to have two pages plagarized from Wikipedia. The offending passage was noticed by the wiki's author, Ydorb, who noted the identical text on a Wikipedia forum. From there it was submitted to Slashdot who…
aardvarchaeology | November 19, 2007Two months from now I'm going to spend a week on the US East Coast, attending two conferences and doing some sightseeing.
From 18 to 22 January I'll be in the Chapel Hill/Durham area of North Carolina for the 2nd Science Blogging Conference, where I'm co-chairing a session on blogging about the humanities and social sciences.
From 23 to 27 January I'll be in Plantation/Ft Lauderdale, Florida, for The Amazing Meeting 5.5, a skeptical conference hosted by James Randi. I think there's a seat on a panel for me there.
Dear Reader, both of these conferences are looking really good, and I'd love to…
aardvarchaeology | November 18, 2007
Dear Reader, it's been a while since I asked you to press any buttons. If you like Aard, and haven't already done so, would you please do me the favour of pressing a button in the left-hand column, right below my profile? Good grades make blogger happy! Thanks.
clock | November 17, 2007Tetrapod Zoology
With all the media circus surrounding Nigersaurus, not enough publicity was given to another cool sauropod described on Thursday - the Xenoposeidon. It is quite amazing what a few years of painstaking study, comparative anatomy and head-scratching can do - reconstruct a large dinosaur from a single remnant: half a vertebra. My SciBling Darren Naish, co-author on the paper, describes it in great detail. I've been waiting for it for about a year or so, since Darren first mentioned it on his old blog in a four-part post about "Angloposeidon". The other co-author, Mike…
neurophilosophy | November 16, 2007I'm off to Egypt later on today to attend my cousin's wedding. I probably won't have access to the internet for the 8 days that I'm there, so I've scheduled some posts for next week: the essay I've just submitted for my Masters will be appearing in a series of four posts, starting on Monday.
Otherwise, there'll be no activity here. I won't even be approving any comments that are posted, but don't let that stop you from commenting, as I'll moderate them all as soon as I get back. Meanwhile, feel free to browse my archives, and don't forget to visit Brain in a Vat this coming Monday fro the…
sciencewoman | November 15, 2007I never officially participated in the last World's Fair meme (although if you google "Minnow motherhood insanity" you get this blog), but now Dave Ng has another fun meme for us.
Anyway, this meme asks that you come up with your own scientific eponym. What's that exactly? Well, first read this excellent primer by Samuel Arbesman, which basically provides a step by step description of how to do this effectively. Then have a go at your own blog. If all goes well, I'd like to create a page at the Science Creative Quarterly, that collects (and links to) the good ones.
Thus, I present you with…
clock | November 13, 2007Join us at the brand new Wine Authorities tomorrow night at 6pm for our special Durham Blogger MeetUp:
The shop has a cool Enomatic machine with which you serve yourself a taste or glass of wine, and a nice big table around which to sit. Teetotalers can grab a coffee or tea next door at Sips.
clock | November 12, 2007If you look over to you right (you may have to refresh your page or click on internal links and thus raise my pageviews to see it) you will see an ad on the right side-bar that takes you to PLoS ONE. The first 50 readers of scienceblogs who click on that ad and complete registration will receive a Free PLoS ONE T-shirt. And then, once registered, use that registration to rate, annotate and comment on articles there.
If you looked around Scienceblogs.com over the last couple of days (I think it is gone now), you could also see the ad for Colbert Report on the top of the page. So, with some…
clock | November 11, 2007I don't think I ever refused a meme, even if I have done it already, especially if a lot of time passed, or one can provide new answers every time. But this one is tough, as I would barely change anything from the last time I did it. But, since it is so old, I'll copy it here again and make a few little changes to it:
4 jobs you've had:
1. Horse trainer and riding instructor, Assistant to the Handicapper and Racing Secretary, as well as the Finish-line judge at the Belgrade Racecourse
2. Translator of Disney comic-strips from English to Serbian
3. Biology teacher at various levels to…
neurophilosophy | November 9, 2007Biological anthropologist Greg Laden and theoretical physicist Dave Bacon have just joined ScienceBlogs. Both of these blogs are fantastic, so go and check them out.
If you're a regular reader of this blog, it's safe to say that you're interested in neurobiology, so you'll probably want to read Greg's summary of the web focus on glial cells in the current issue of Nature Neuroscience.
sciencewoman | November 6, 2007I'm being productive today, working on my revisions, but I've noticed a few really good posts around the blogosphere the last few days, so I wanted to share them with a broader audience.
First, ScienceMama at Mother of All Scientists discusses going back to work after the birth of her daughter (and promises us that this is part 1 of infinity):
I want to find a better balance between work and raising my child(ren). There is a dearth of flexible work situations in science. And it makes me sad that while the women's movement has made great strides in getting women into the workforce, there aren'…