Science & Society

The good news-- I am writing a four eBook series with O'Reilly (publishers of MAKE) on four Do-It-Yourself Space topics! Woo hoo! Now the advice portion. I occasionally have a habit of taking a more difficult path. Here is that difficult path. For ...

Article - Project Calliope - Jun 28 2011 - 4:40pm

Skepticism Of Stories To Good To Be True

On a recent post, I was asked how facilitated communication supporters explain the tests that show FC doesn't work. On something so easily shown to be false, why does this persist? Why are major organizations like the Autism Society (and apparently Au ...

Article - Kim Wombles - Jun 29 2011 - 9:20am

Anti-Science Positions That Threaten American Food Security

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s federal regulatory process is stifling commercial investment in the development of genetically engineered animals for food, warns a task force led by a U.C. Davis animal scientist, and that could have serious implic ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 29 2011 - 5:06pm

Health Care Reform Will Be Worse For Illegal Immigrants

Here's a way to make the bloated costs of health care reform seem more palatable to opponents- it will knock 220,000 illegal immigrants out of the health care system just in California alone. A new policy brief from the UCLA Center for Health Policy R ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 1 2011 - 9:15am

Analyzing Discovery

Studying science quantitavely has often taken the form of studying publications, such as citation counts, or identifying author networks. But now, Samuel Arbesman and Nicholas Christakis (2011) argue that there are two fairly recent developments that would ...

Article - Gunnar De Winter - Jul 4 2011 - 12:03pm

The Next Big Thing: New Scientist Poll

Recently, New Scientist (with the Royal Academy of Engineering as competition partner) started a poll/competition where readers could send in a brief statement of what they thought would be the 'nex big thing' in engineering. The question was � ...

Blog Post - Gunnar De Winter - Jul 5 2011 - 3:27am

Blooming Botany (3B)

Botany: A Blooming History The last episode of the series by Timothy Walker majored on the exploits of noble scientists whose aim was ...

Article - Robert H Olley - Jul 5 2011 - 6:13pm

Concordle- A Story About The Web

This short story is about a surprising effect: you put something on the web without much advertising for it- and it might find perhaps more users than if you publish it in a traditional Journal. Here I talk about scientific or educational text. I often fin ...

Article - Ladislav Kocbach - Jul 10 2011 - 1:40am

Kickstarter Science Catches On

Must be a zeitgeist thing. Our own Ground Station Calliope kickstarter fundraiser succeeded, to help fund our Science 2.0 Project Calliope. Now the NY Times is reporting that other scientists have also been using kickstarter to fund science. They cite m ...

Article - Project Calliope - Jul 12 2011 - 7:58pm

University Research Under Attack (And One Defense)

One of these loons who thinks all university research is worthless managed to get another op-ed to that effect published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It's worth looking at, not for the article itself, but for the lengthy and emotional comm ...

Article - Fred Phillips - Jul 18 2011 - 8:16pm