Science & Society
Hank |
If you are in the Washington, D.C. and only have 48 hours to kill, I have bad news - the USA Science&Engineering Festival has likely packed an entire month of good stuff into this weekend, so you will need Solomon-like wisdom to choose what you want to see.
Larry Bock, head visionary of the event, is a master of logistics, planning and science enthusiasm and we've gushed over his achievements before - but just being able to get an event on the National Mall is more work than most of us would do and adding 1500 activities and 75 stage shows is downright amazing.
They've got Bill Nye…
CNN covers the vaccine issue in a news article on its website, highlighting a family who nearly lost their child to Hib because they had bought into the doubts, fears, and misinformation out there regarding vaccines.
It's an effective story, highlighting the very real dangers, say, from contracting Hib, where one in twenty children who contract it will DIE.
According to WHO:
"Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) is a bacteria responsible for severe pneumonia, meningitis and other invasive diseases almost exclusively in children aged less than 5 years. It is transmitted through the respiratory…
A Nuclear Eco-Catastrophe
Fans of British apocalypse novels a la Wyndham and John Christopher ought to enjoy Chalres Eric Maine’s The Tide Went Out, another story focused the catastrophic disintegration of British society in the context of a world-wide disaster. Journalist Philip Wade writes a speculative story about the potential adverse geological effects of nuclear testing, and inadvertently almost reveals a tightly held state secret. The recent nuclear tests of ‘Operation Nutcracker’ have busted open the earth’s crust, and the oceans are draining away into the earth’s interior. Wade has…
Emerson said “A man is what he thinks about all day long…….”. What controls our thought process? We can have 9 types of thoughts as are the “ rasa”. Some of the thoughts could be of Love, hate, fear anger, devotion, renunciation , happiness, pleasure and pain.
What haunts us most is the thought of ungratefulness of someone for whom we have done a lot and what causes maximum agony is the idea to settle the score with him . We keep on brooding all bad things that s/he has done to us and keep on remembering the ungratefulness. But is s/he listening. No. Is s/he affected? Only our health…
Hank |
I don't know who decides this "week" stuff - generally, I assume people who do the marketing make the rules so if I decide I want a Science 2.0 Week I get a few people to promote it and that's that, I have a Science 2.0 Week.
In Andrea Kuszewki's What Happened To Creativity In Science? she mentioned it was open access week and then a commenter on Does Open Access Lead To More Quality Citations? The Data Says ... said the same thing so I looked at his site and, sure enough, it is Open Access Week.
Open access is primarily promoted by evangelists, especially in the early days and, despite being…
Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End was my main pick for 1953 in our survey of post-apocalyptic sci-fi, but John Wyndham's Kraken Wakes is another great apocalypse novel from the same year. (It was published as Out of the Deeps in the US. Apparently Americans weren't expected to know what Kraken means, until the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie, because now China Mieville can publish a novel just called Kraken and people purchase it.)
Kraken Wakes is much like The Day of the Triffids in style and development. It's an apocalypse that develops slowly at first, and then suddenly there's a…
antunes |
Hi all, I'm giving an invited talk at the AGU this year and would looooove to hook up with other Science2.0-ers. Anyone else going to be there, or in San Fran, Dec 13-17? I'll be there on the 16th and probably stay the weekend. Would love to meet up, go to a talk, give a talk, something science-y and interesting.
Alex
Happiness is defined in east and west in different manner.
Amassing huge amount of wealth by rulers in east was considered to make them happy while saints of eastern philosophy derived their happiness in renunciation of world.
One boy was sitting on a buffalo in South East Asian country and my German Professor was in a mood to talk to him. He talked to him through intermediate fellow. My Professor asked him why do you not go to school ? He asked what will happen if I go to school? You will get degrees? What will happen with degrees? You will get a good job? What will happen with good job?…
During the recession, a number of people have begun to value work less (unless finances force them to value work much, much more) - time away from family, less leisure time and fewer self-improvement activities have begun to get noticed.
In other words, the human condition that causes us to devalue something until we no longer have it is in full force. A new study also indicated that recession-related stress tends to manifest differently in men and women.
Wayne Hochwarter, the Jim Moran Professor of Business Administration in the Florida State University College of Business…
If you like to read science studies you are most likely to get them through one of two avenues; the long-standing business model has been that a print journal gets the study and does the work formatting it and lends their 'goodwill' to it with marketing - in return, they hold copyright and subscribers pay to read it. A more recent approach has been companies that instead charge the scientists to publish the study but reading it is free - open access versus toll access, proponents claim, though in a practical sense someone is either paying to read or someone is paying to publish.
The…