On Blogging And Soothsaying


The internet is a wonderful means of spreading information, but there is a danger of spreading misinformation.  It probably takes far fewer years of education to read a science article than to fully understand it.  The danger is that, just as many people rely on their horoscopes, so too do many people rely on their favorite bloggers to do their critical thinking for them.

Over at Marginal Revolution economist Tyler Cowan has started one of those blog trends, and many other bloggers have followed like a pack of lemmings.

In Adventures in Ethics and Science, Janet Stemwedel asks some questions about peer review — its purpose and its effect — prompted by strong online criticism of a peer-reviewed paper that was published with at least some significant review comments ignored.

One particularly interesting statement that Janet makes is in the second sentence of this paragraph:

As Bora was the "editor" of the paper rather than an official referee of the paper, it’s not clear whether the journal editors overseeing the fate of this submission actually forwarded Bora’s critiques onto the author, or if they did forward the critiques to the author but indicated that they wouldn’t coun

It's Earth Hour - Let's Black Out Big Time!


Earth hour is an event organised by the World Wide Fund for Nature in which participants switch off lights for one hour at night.  The objective is to produce an hour of darkness as a means of highlighting the need for global action on climate change.

Earth Hour - climate change campaigners urge global switch-off

The fourth annual lights-out event expects 1 billion participants, and counts for the first time international landmarks including the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State building and the Burj Khalifa

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/mar/26/energy-climate-change

A pale pink, half-moon shaped scar sits above my left breast as a  reminder of my youth spent at Jones Beach with more baby oil than sunscreen, doing more baking than bathing. My scar is from having MOHS micrographic surgery, after basal cell carcinoma was found in a biopsy of a mole.

Basal cell carcinoma is one of several types of nonmelanoma skin cancers, which are the most common forms of skin cancer in the United States.  According to a study in the "Archives of
Dermatology", as of 2006, there have been 3.5 million cases a year in 2 million American people.

Princeton researchers found that high-fructose corn syrup-- the basic sweetener is sodas and just about everything-- causes more weight gain that sugar.  Calorie for calorie, rats got fatter on the corn syrup than on sugar.

And at the same time, PepsiCo has released 'Throwback' products-- Pepsi sodas made with sugar instead of corn syrup.  So if researchers are saying sugar is better for you, we need to check which tastes better-- corn syrup or sugar?

Consumers continue to click on spam despite awareness of how bots and viruses spread through risky email behavior, according to the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG). Their findings were based on a survey it released today covering North America and Western Europe and said that even though over eighty percent of email users are aware of the existence of bots, tens of millions respond to spam in ways that could leave them vulnerable to a malware infection.

A team of geologists say that, in just two centuries, stunning population growth, sprawling megacities and increased use of fossil fuels have wrought such vast and unprecedented changes to our world that humans actually might be ushering in a new geological time interval they have dubbed the "Anthropocene Epoch".

Writing in Environmental Science and Technology, the team says the dawning of this new epoch may include the sixth largest mass extinction in Earth's history.

Depictions of bioethical issues and professionalism portrayed in two popular medical dramas—"Grey's Anatomy" and "House, M.D."—suggest that the shows are "rife" with ethical dilemmas and actions that often run afoul of professional codes of conduct, according to a review in the Journal of Medical Ethics

The authors admit that their findings would end up stating the obvious. But they nonetheless wanted to provide data that would explain how these depictions influence the perceptions of viewers, both health professionals and the general public.

They also hope the research will inform discussions about whether medical dramas should be shown in a classroom to spur conversations about ethics and professionalism among medical and nursing students.

University students have developed a computer game that is operated by eye movements, which could allow people with severe physical disabilities to become 'gamers' for the first time.

The technology behind the game may one day be adapted to create more sophisticated games and applications such as wheelchairs and computer cursors controlled by eye movements.

The researchers adapted an open source game called 'Pong', where a player moves a bat to hit a ball as it bounces around the screen. The adaptation enables the player to move the bat using their eye.