OpenScience / Policy



72hours.org

Northern Indiana isn’t prone to hurricanes, earthquakes or many major disasters, but we do get the occasional tornado, and a few years ago we had an ice storm that knocked out power in our neighborhood for a few days. And … Continue reading

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Don’t dumb me down

There’s a wonderful Bad Science column by Ben Goldacre in the Guardian all about media coverage of science and why media reports on science are uniformly horrible. Here’s an excerpt: Science stories usually fall into three families: wacky stories, scare … Continue reading

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Posted in Fun, Policy, Science | 1 Comment

Maybe the Feds should be watching NOVA

Our buddy CES links to this prescient 12-minute segment from NOVA’s scienceNOW which aired on January 25th, 2005. It contains this amazing quote from Walter Maestri, the emergency manager for the city of New Orleans: What really scares me to … Continue reading

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Best Katrina Quote

By way of Pharyngula, we have this quote from The Sideshow: Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. (A combination of two famous sci-fi quotes: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” from Arthur C. Clarke and Hanlon’s … Continue reading

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Other Presidential Appointees besides Michael Brown

In all of the discussion on the net over whether being fired from a job overseeing judges at horse shows would qualify you to be the head of FEMA, and whether the head of the department of homeland security could … Continue reading

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A Conversation on Charles Murray and “The Inequality Taboo”

Charles Murray, one of the authors of The Bell Curve, has broken his decade-long silence on the subject of group differences in IQ. Shockingly, he’s come out of his shell to defend Larry Summers. This has seen a number of … Continue reading

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NYT series on Intelligent Design

I’ve tried to like the science reporting in the times on the ID controversy, but I just can’t. This third article was OK, but reading the first two was like listening to fingernails on a blackboard. I wish journalists didn’t … Continue reading

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Elliot Sober on the Design Argument

I was just reading this article on the Design Argument contributed to The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Religion by Elliot Sober. Here’s a quick two-paragraph quote: In the continuing conflict (in the United States) between evolutionary biology and creationism, … Continue reading

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Darwin’s Dangerous Idea

This paragraph is from Daniel Dennett’s 1995 book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life: "Now if you want to reason about faith, and offer a reasoned (and reason-responsive) defense of faith as an extra category of belief … Continue reading

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Online article submission systems

So we just submitted a new article to Biophys. J. I’ve done online article submission through five different sites now; the ACS paragon system is probably the nicest of the bunch and the Biophysical Journal system, well, it needs some … Continue reading

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