During the Obama administration, he was concerned about vaccines causing autism and it showed when it came to guidance about swine flu vaccines. His administration banned multi-use vials because of his party's insistence that preservatives caused the disorder.
US scientists are significantly more likely to publish fake research than scientists from elsewhere, according to a bold statement published in a BMJ press release. The press release is about a paper called 'Retractions in the scientific literature: do authors deliberately commit research fraud?' in the Journal of Medical Ethics. How did he arrive at that conclusion? Language and apparently poor understanding of statistics.
Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, had a life-changing event occur almost one year ago. On November 19th, 2009, a thousand e-mail messages and documents, many his correspondence, were released to the public.Many stressed that those messages were stolen(1), as if the process vindicated the content (would it do so if damning emails had been from Exxon or BP?) but that was small solace because climate science was already suffering backlash and climate science detractors had a field day alleging the entire process was tainted.
Hurricane forecasts were way off again last year so if you're still wondering if a trained chimp 'can predict hurricanes better than NOAA'(1) a Nature Geoscience article has good news for you; forecasts can still be wrong 75% of the time but now can be wrong for years in advance too.
University of California president Mark G. Yudof has issued an 'open letter' to California to talk about the budget problems the system is facing and how they want to deal with the issues facing the state- "I am writing today to let Californians know about the fiscal realities that confront the university, and also about some recommendations I intend to bring next week to our governing Board of Regents. First, though, I'd like to provide a bit of background."So I will list what he writes and then translate that into economic reality, as seen by people who actually live here but are not employed by the state.
2010 is the biggest year for life on Mars since 1898. Or 1955 or whenever the last 'life on other planets' craze hit the public. But unlike those other times, there is good reason. This year, over 20 different papers have invoked the chance there may once have been life on Mars in their work. There is now all kinds of data discussing water on Mars, minerals on Mars and even that the soil might support life. The Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets alone has 64 papers on Mars so far this year.
1,400,000 70-dimension histogram vectors about gamer behavior. What can you do with that?Me? Nothing, the math is too much but, if you can make sense of it, a lot of data is there in the ongoing online gaming phenomenon known as World of Warcraft(WoW). Keeping track of all that data would seem to be solely the purview of computer programmers but sociologists are starting to take notice. Some people are just goofing off and writing a book about their experiences but others see gold in 'game mining' - the insights of anthropology we can get by seeing what 10 million people do in a virtual, controlled setting over a period of years.
After "Five Million Miles to Earth" and "Dead of Night" we get to something a little more modern in our 5 Days of Halloween Movies.
After watching "Five Million Years To Earth", a terrific mix of science, horror and anthropology, it's no crime to associate British horror cinema with Hammer Films, even though that was not one of the bloody Dracula films which earned them their fame.
It's playoff time in baseball and the Giants have home field advantage over the Texas Rangers starting tomorrow, October 27th.Baseball, more so than any other sport, lends itself to numerical analysis because virtually everything except defense is rigorously quantifiable. There are some details, such as an umpire who might call a wider strike zone than another, but at least from a rules perspective the strike zone is what it is.
You may not know the name Hammer Films, but if you have watched movies at all you have probably heard of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. In 1957 they appeared in a British 'horror' movie called THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN and it put both of them, and the studio, on the cultural map.
If you're like me, not only do you want to be buried, you want to be buried with your treasure in a vast underground labyrinth dug from the stone, behind a series of traps and secret doors, and your treasure will be in the very last room with my undead Lich guarding it.Want your inheritance, descendants? Bring a sword.But other people have long been more environmentally responsible and made the 'ashes to ashes, dust to dust' route a little more direct than a decomposing coffin much less a concrete, subterranean bunker. They get cremated.
49 light years away from Earth in the constellation Lyra is a binary star that may cause a rethink on how gas giant planets were created.
