- It’s in the Daily Mail, so I’m confident it got everything wrong
- [Pharyngula]
…I actually use the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus [website] every semester, in the first lecture of our introductory biology course! After giving an overview of the scientific method and how to ask good scientific questions, I use it as an example: I show them the page, read a few excerpts, and ask them what they think…and always the majority of students are skeptical…
Then we discuss how to validate scientific information, what we look for to trust a source, and further, I ask them to think more deeply about how, if the website passed a routine sniff test, we'd also go on to test unusual claims in nature. My experience has been that students are much more rational and practical about evaluating material on the web than we'd give them credit for…
- 11.302J Urban Design Politics
- [MIT OpenCourseWare]
This is a seminar about the ways that urban design contributes to the distribution of political power and resources in cities. "Design," in this view, is not some value-neutral aesthetic applied to efforts at urban development but is, instead, an integral part of the motives driving that development. The class investigates the nature of the relations between built form and political purposes through close examination of a wide variety of situations where public and private sector design commissions and planning processes have been clearly motivated by political pressures, as well as situations where the political assumptions have remained more tacit. We will explore cases from both developed and developing countries.
- In Images: How to Build a Giant Ice Dome
- A huge ice dome erected in Obergurgl, Austria, now serves as a bar. Here's how the engineers built it.
- Corvid savants
- [Why Evolution Is True - with links, blockquotes, videos, and a book recommendation]
The science section of yesterday’s New York Times has a piece about New Caledonian crows (Corvus moneduloides) by the ever-readable Natalie Angier. She highlights their remarkable intelligence, manifested in their ability to make tools:…
Why are these crows the most adept tool-makers of all animals besides humans—and that includes other primates? Angier highlights two new papers explaining the theories…
They even have local toolmaking “styles”:…
- Forget About Abortion, Let’s Focus on the Mental Health Effects of Pregnancy and Parenting | RHRealityCheck.org – Amie Newman
- …This most recent study, carried out by Danish researchers…tracked a whopping 84,620 girls and women…who had a first trimester abortion or who had birthed a baby (for the first time).
…[It] actually confirms that in fact childbirth is more psychologically traumatic for women than is abortion…
"…more women will suffer from postpartum depression and related illnesses this year than the combined number of new cases for men and women of tuberculosis, leukemia, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease and epilepsy."
…how is it that we get to the present day, enmeshed in a political battle which uses immense political capital, time and money to present a false case to women that accessing safe, legal abortion care will harm us psychologically, to the point where we should outlaw even the option, while we struggle to find the resources and funding to address real, honest struggles facing women who chose to carry a pregnancy to term?
- Defend Planned Parenthood from the rightwing smear machine
- The right-wing smear machine that took down Shirley Sherrod, Van Jones and ACORN is at it again. This time they are going after Planned Parenthood…
After a series of suspicious visits by individuals claiming to be sex traffickers, Planned Parenthood reported to Attorney General Eric Holder on what appeared to be an illegal undercover video operation targeting 12 of its clinics nationwide.
…extremist anti-choice activists released an edited, distortion-filled video on Tuesday using footage from their undercover visit to a New Jersey clinic.
…find out more about this and an easy way to take action [at this link.]
- Wordless Wednesday – Civil Rights Heroine
- February is Black History Month, and this week's Wordless Wednesday image is of one of the best-known women of the civil rights movement.
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- Wednesday Geek Woman: Colleen Fitzpatrick, forensic genealogist
- Colleen Fitzpatrick is a forensic genealogist: she uses clues from DNA analysis, photos, fingerprints, and family history to identify unknown persons. One of the leading lights in a field that’s booming due to new interest in genealogy and new advances in genetic techniques, she’s been involved in a number of high profile cases….
…she spends much of her time working with amateur genealogists, teaching people techniques for solving their own family mysteries. She’s published three books about forensic genealogy, and has started the Fitzpatrick DNA Study, an attempt to find and unite descendants of the Fitzpatrick clan.
She also founded a high-tech company out of her garage and worked on optics for the now-cancelled NASA mission to Jupiter.
- Issa Expands Probe Of Alleged Politicization Of FOIA Requests At DHS | TPMMuckraker
- …expanded investigation into department's alleged practice of stalling hundreds of requests for federal records while political advisers looked into the backgrounds of people requesting the documents.
Issa also accused the DHS's Office of General Counsel of instructing career staff not to search for documents he had requested.
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[In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. Signal boosts are awesome! --L.]
The Of interest (Wed, Feb 2nd, 9am) by Lee Salazar, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at leesalazar.com.