Archive for Uncategorized
March 15, 2010 at 4:59 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
I’ve been following a new birding blog lately, “The Daily Wing,” kept by Vermont bird guide, dragonfly follower, and writer Bryan Pfeiffer. It’s a nice mix of
• birding how-to, with guidance both basic and intricate, such as his lovely entry on a bird-attraction technique he calls spishing (especially effective in winter):
The woods were otherwise silent. Vacant. But I suspected otherwise. So I stopped and spished.
“Spshsh-spshsh-spshsh-spshsh. Psssp-psssp-psssp-psssp-psssp. Spshsh-spshsh-spshsh-spshsh.”
Two white-throated sparrows jumped into view from a tangle of catbrier. Then several more. An eastern towhee belted out a plucky reeEEP! I kept spishing. A northern cardinal emerged and uttered its short, bright peek note. Two hermit thrushes popped onto a white oak branch, flicked their wings and repeated a couple of soft chuck calls.
But the concert was only beginning.
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Original post by David Dobbs none@example.com
March 15, 2010 at 4:00 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Perhaps you’ve heard of the case of Poul Thorsen. Perhaps not. Either way, that anti-vaccine movement was making a huge deal over this Danish psychiatrist and researcher for two reasons. First, he has become embroiled in some sort of scandal involving research funds at his former place of employment, Aarhus University, leading the ever-hyperbolic Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to post a characteristic bit of conspiracy mongering nonsense to that font of anti-vaccine nonsense, The Huffington Post, in an article entitled Central figure in CDC Vaccine Cover-Up Absconds with $2M. The second reason is implicit in the title, namely that Thorsen was a coauthor on two important studies from Denmark supporting the safety of vaccines and refuting a correlation with autism, one published in the New England Journal of Medicine and dealing with the MMR vaccine and the other published in the journal Pediatrics and failing to show a link between [...]
Original post by Orac none@example.com
March 15, 2010 at 3:27 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
At first, I was going to title this post WSJ: Incompetent Ranting. Then
I decided that was too strong. Then I read the article again, and
went back to the original title. Mind you, this is not intended
to be an ad hominem attack. The author, Edward
Shorter,
has been the Hannah Professor in the History of Medicine since 1991,
and in 1996 was cross-appointed as Professor of Psychiatry (at the
University of Toronto). He has written some good books, including
A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of
Prozac. The book was reviewed
favorably in an APA journal.
The WSJ article is so fraught with problems, that I thought it must
have
been written by a Scientologist, or someone like that. No, Dr.
Shorter is a serious academician. Perhaps his perspective has
been
distorted by some unstated agenda. I don’t know.
(Note: the WSJ has a dorky semi-permeable paywall, so the link below
might not work. If it does not, perhaps [...]
Original post by Joseph j7uy5 none@example.com
March 15, 2010 at 3:05 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Here’s a question for all of you journal editors and editorial board members out there. Does every single manuscript that your journal receives get the same peer-review treatment? Is there no pre-screening before stuff gets sent to reviewers, where patently kooky or ignorant contributions are killed on arrival?
Is peer review 100%? Should it be? Would that be a wise way to use a journal’s resources? Discuss.
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Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Collective Imagination
Original post by Martin R none@example.com
March 15, 2010 at 9:09 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Avi Abrams of Dark Roasted Blend has a neat collaboration with National Geographic Channel. In his post, The Great Sperm Race: The Most Extreme Race on Earth, Avi has got exclusive images and videos from "Sizing Up Sperm" – a NatGeo feature that uses real people to represent 250 million sperm on their quest to be the first to reach the egg:
The story begins in the testicle — depicted as a building that would be 3,000 feet, more than double the height of the Empire State Building, if the sperm were human-sized. Next it’s a high-speed evacuation from the skyscraper along a 10-mile, ultra-fast water slide to the female, where the constant barrage of threats begin. For the sperm, landing in the female’s vagina is like storming the beaches on D-Day, only facing chemical weapons in the form of a deadly acid attack on the hundreds of millions of invaders. [...]
Original post by Alex
March 15, 2010 at 8:30 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Squirrel photo bombs are sooo 2009. Seal bombs, now that’s what’s hip now!
Link
Original post by Jill Harness
March 15, 2010 at 6:19 am · Filed under Uncategorized
This week a couple of my Sciblings have been abuzz about an article published in some journal I’d never heard of… a minor impact journal…the Journal of Who Gives a Fuck Science Communication. Bora has a great break down of some of the major criticisms. Drugmonkey, one of the subjects of the “analysis” in this article, is also displeased and critical of the author’s conclusions.
I’ve
since read the offending article and can only tell you this - I have no
idea what the balls the author is talking about. Seriously, this
article is about as informative as this:
Video 1: A current favorite at the Isis house. When emailed this video, PhysioProf
replied, ” Couldn’t they afford to animate some fucking legs on those
fuckers?” I have always wondered why Mr. Lunt has no eyes.
But, for those of you who are still interested, here’s the run down…
Inna Kouper,
a graduate student in Library and Information Science at [...]
Original post by Isis the Scientist none@example.com
March 15, 2010 at 5:57 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Christian Marclay is a DJ and a composer of mashups, both audio and visual. He puts album covers together to make mashups that are more than the sum of their parts. Link -via mental_floss
Original post by Miss Cellania
March 15, 2010 at 5:38 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Old time vinegar pie
It’s Pi day or Pi(e) day…either way you look at it today is 3/14 so a good excuse to eat some pie and Scienceblogs and Serious Eats have teamed up to hold a pi(e) contest. Upon discovering this contest I enthusiastically embarked upon dreaming up something fitting for the famous number. After inspiration from some of the previous year’s submissions, I came up with the idea of ‘irrationally good’ pie, since pi is an irrational number. I wanted something that sounded like it shouldn’t be in a pie, yet it was good. My main hurdle was I couldn’t think of anything that might be both tasty, and equally it needed to sound like something that shouldn’t be in a pie. So what does one do when in a bind? Call in an expert.
I needed an expert in the field and consultant, [...]
Original post by Joanna Pool none@example.com
March 15, 2010 at 4:14 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Take a look at this lovely and cute collection of miniature copies of some animals, like the horse. Several breeds of horse are less than three feet tall!
People sometimes train them as service animals (be the first on your block with a “Seeing Eye Horse”), and even as house pets, since I presume they make tiny road apples. However, they are still horses when it comes down to it, and their natural reaction to being scared is to run like hell, so they won’t be replacing your Black Lab anytime soon for those long walks in the woods playing fetch.
Link – via weirdworm
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by euphoriajoca.
Original post by Queuebot
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