International Year of Biodiversity 2010 (official video)
via youtube.com
If you are on Facebook, become a fan of the International Year of Biodiversity 2010 page for more information on the issues throughout this year.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Thursday, February 25, 2010
The Sibley eGuide to the Birds of North America - now a (pricey) iPhone app
The Sibley Guide to Birds is now available as an app for iPhone and iPod Touch. Check it out at the iTunes app store (here).Here's a review of the app, which just hit the iTunes store earlier this week. While I own and like the paper copy of the Sibley Guide to Birds, I'm not quite ready to drop 30 bucks on this app yet. The most interesting feature seems to be the bird song collection, which apparently includes multiple recordings/variants. Sounds like an audio equivalent of the multiple illustrations which distinguish the paperback Guide - if so, the app becomes more compelling as an alternative/companion to iBird Explorer Pro, which I have become used to on my iPhone, and which seems to be better designed as an app, and has a few more features - perhaps. Unfortunately, unlike a paperback field guide that I can browse through in a bookstore before purchasing, there is no way to try this app out before buying it! But, whom am I kidding - I'll probably get it anyway, eventually, just as I have the paperback Sibley as a backup to my preferred National Geographic Guide. One can never have too many field guides - and the publishers of these eGuides are counting on that kind of thinking from a (sizeable) niche market. But why aren't they dropping prices at least below that of the paperback edition? Why does the otherwise successful app store pricing model (low price+high volume=profit) not apply to these field guides? If anyone reading this has bought the app, I'd love to hear what you think!
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Alison Gopnik on medicating children and the difference between science and journalism
Alison Gopnik (author of one of my favorite books: The Scientist in the Crib) offers an excellent critique of Judith Warner's new book about medicating children. Gopnik's review is really well worth reading because of the clear distinction she makes between journalistic and scientific investigation, and the real questions we miss by not applying the scientific approach. Here's an excerpt:
[Hat-tip: @BoraZ]
It's a truth verging on a truism that journalism is about telling stories. But what exactly is it that narratives—good stories—do for us? Stories work because they explain important or unusual or compelling events in terms of our everyday psychology—the causal principles that we all understand by the time we are 4. A good journalist explains why the health care bill failed, for example, by telling us about the beliefs, desires, and emotions of the wavering senators.
But science isn't about applying the causal principles we know about. It's about discovering causal principles we don't know about. Psychological science, in particular, is about using evidence to find new and unexpected causal explanations for our actions and experiences. It's not about using our everyday psychological knowledge to explain what we do. When psychologists do that, we rightly accuse them of just telling us what we already know.
This is especially true when scientists are trying to explain the conditions we vaguely call "clinical" or "dysfunctional" or "pathological." After all, people aren't pathological when they are angry or frustrated or sad because of what they want or believe. They are pathological precisely when we can't explain their miseries in the normal way—when the successful author suddenly kills himself, or when the bright child with loving and concerned parents just can't read no matter how hard she tries. Clinical scientists try to use evidence to discover the less than obvious causal principles (his serotonin level was too low, she can't process language sounds) that can explain these events.Read the rest of the review if you are concerned about excessive use of medication to control children's behavior. The other key point is that science isn't about confirming common sense notions of causality, but about overcoming the limitations of said common sense and finding real causes. That's worth remembering.
[Hat-tip: @BoraZ]
Monday, February 22, 2010
Alligator vs. Burmese Python - A reptilian battle over the Everglades
via pbs.org
The above remarkable video footage is part of the excellent, and frightening, new documentary "Invasion of the Giant Pythons" that aired on PBS's Nature program last night.
Burmese Pythons transported and bred halfway across the planet for sale to people who want them as pets without apparently any notion of how big the beasts can get, and who then release them into the wilds of Florida, again without any thought as to how seriously they are fracking up the Everglades ecosystem while "solving" their little growing pet problem! Isn't it remarkable how many astonishing ways we find to screw up the ecosystems on this lovely little planet we inhabit? Watch the whole film, which I imagine will be available online soon.
How the Spoon-billed Sandpiper uses its unique beak
via youtube.com
David Sibley, of the Sibley Guides to Birds fame, recorded the above video of the critically endangered Spoon-billed Sandpiper, Eurynorhynchus pygmeus, foraging in the mudflats of Thailand where they winter. In an expanding upon the observations annotating the above video, Sibley proposes a hypothesis about how these lovely little birds use their odd bills more like shovels than spoons:
Before seeing the birds, most people assume that they use their bills to swipe sideways through the water, in the manner of the true spoonbills (genus Platalea), sensing and grabbing food items as they pass between the flattened tips of the mandibles. But in reality these sandpipers use very little sideways motion in their feeding. There does seem to be a bit more sideways movement of the bill than in other small sandpipers such as Red-necked Stint, but these are subtle, irregular, and tiny movements and nothing like the rhythmic sideways swiping of true spoonbills.Coming up with a new hypothesis proved difficult. At first I couldn’t detect any difference in the way these sandpipers fed compared to the stints. They do tend to keep their head down and their bill in the water for longer stretches than the Red-necked Stints, which have a more frenetic foraging action dipping their bill briefly into the water and mud and then raising it again, over and over. Also, the Spoon-bills seemed to feed exclusively in water – I never saw one feeding on open mudflats.
After several days of observation I noticed that while their bills were in the water the Spoon-billed Sandpipers were pushing lumps of mud and algae ahead of them, using their bills as shovels to move mud around. They always look a bit “husky” and thick-necked, which comes in part from this habit of pushing the bill through the mud, as they use their body for leverage and push with their legs. It’s not unusual to see one of their feet suddenly slip backwards under the effort of pushing. Once some mud or algae has been lifted the bird very quickly works the bill tip around underneath it, then moves on. This video shows the shoveling motion clearly in the last scene. (The video will be a little sharper if you click here to open it in YouTube and select 480p).
This seems like a plausible hypothesis to explain the unusual bill shape. The broad bill tip could be used as a shovel to get under and lift up loose substrates, and then would make an effective tool for finding and grabbing any small invertebrates that were in the slurry of mud and water flowing in behind the lifted material. This could also explain why they cover so much ground on the mudflats. If they are looking for loose bits of mud/algae/etc. that they can lift to search for prey, these might be scattered across a wide area, forcing them to walk in search of these foraging opportunities.
Have you ever seen these birds forage? Are you in a position to make more observations in other locations to see if they do the same thing? I am not, much to my regret while watching the above video... Given the rapidly declining populations and our ignorance about even their basic biology, it is clear that the spoons these birds are born holding in their mouths are far from silver ones! Can we at least find out how this marvel of evolution, this wonderful spoon-bill, works before we are forced to bid adieu to the Spoon-billed Sandpiper?
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Yet another reason for Israel to become the 51st of the United States of America
For they too have, among the top echelons of their government, "scientists" in charge of public education who do not accept the evidence for evolution or global warming! Wow:
The Education Ministry's chief scientist sparked a furor among environmental activists and scholars Saturday with remarks questioning the reliability of evolution and global warming theory. The comments from Dr. Gavriel Avital, the latest in a series of written and oral statements casting doubts on the fundamental tenets of modern science, led several environmentalists to call for his dismissal.Now isn't that further evidence of the strong cultural ties between the US and Israel? Doesn't it lend support to the long-argued case for making Israel the 51st state of the US? Further evidence of a shared anathema to science comes courtesy of the NCSE, suggesting that this anti-scientific rot is not limited to the political upper echelons of Israeli government, but may be rather widespread among the general populace as well:
"If textbooks state explicitly that human beings' origins are to be found with monkeys, I would want students to pursue and grapple with other opinions. There are many people who don't believe the evolutionary account is correct," Avital said yesterday.
"There are those for whom evolution is a religion and are unwilling to hear about anything else. Part of my responsibility, in light of my position with the Education Ministry, is to examine textbooks and curricula," he said. "If they keep writing in textbooks that the Earth is growing warmer because of carbon dioxide emissions, I'll insist that isn't the case."
Unfortunately, Avital's views on evolution may be shared by a sizable segment of the Israeli public. A 2006 survey of public opinion in Israel by the Samuel Neaman Institute found that "a minority of only 28% accepts the scientific theory of the evolution [sic], while the majority (59%) believes that man was created by god," while according to the 2000 International Social Survey Programme, a total of 54% of Israeli respondents described "Human beings developed from earlier species of animals" as definitely or probably true, placing Israel ahead of the United States (46%, in last place) for its public acceptance of evolution, but behind twenty-three of the twenty-seven countries included in the report.And I'm (sadly) gratified to find a shared brotherhood with my biologist colleagues in Israel who find themselves rather unexpectedly having to bat down this kind of inanity.
Teach the Controversy - sure... but which one?!
Keep pushing teachers to "teach the controversy" - but you may not like what you get when they do! And this teacher didn't even hit upon my ancestral religion!!
What rhymes with Galapagos?
via au.tv.yahoo.com
Fun to see Baba Brinkman freestyling for Darwin down under... and a pretty good response to the tough question too, although he didn't really come up with a proper rhyming companion word for Galapagos. So what does rhyme with Galapagos?
Monday, February 15, 2010
Where are the outposts of the American Empire? A complete list.
Pretty much all over the globe it seems:
Just as Hadrian succeeded Trajan, Domitian succeeded Titus, Nero succeeded Claudius, and Caligula succeeded Tiberius, so Kennedy replaced Eisenhower, Nixon replaced Johnson, Reagan replaced Carter, and Obama replaced Bush.
Same empire, different emperor.
The extent of the U.S. global empire is almost incalculable. We know enough, however, about foreign bases, physical assets, military spending, and foreign troop levels to know that we have an empire in everything but the name.
There are, according to the Department of Defense's "Base Structure Report" for FY 2009, 716 U.S. military bases on foreign soil in thirty-eight countries. Yet, according to the expert on this subject, Chalmers Johnson, the author of Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis, that number is far too low: "The official figures omit espionage bases, those located in war zones, including Iraq and Afghanistan, and miscellaneous facilities in places considered too sensitive to discuss or which the Pentagon for its own reasons chooses to exclude -- e.g. in Israel, Kosovo, or Jordan." Johnson places the real number of foreign bases closer to 1,000.
This same Base Structure Report states that the DOD's physical assets consist of "more than 539,000 facilities (buildings, structures and linear structures) located on more than 5,570 sites, on approximately 29 million acres." The 307,295 buildings occupied by the DOD comprise over 2.1 billion square feet. The DOD manages almost 30 million acres of land worldwide.
Read the rest of the above post to find the complete list of the outposts of US empire that have endured through various Emperors, including the current one. Interesting that this crops up just as I'm beginning to work on filing my taxes to support this empire...
Sunday, February 14, 2010
OMG!! Watch out for a computer bug that goes after your cursor!!
Those predatory instincts are hard to curb, so you've got to go after any small moving object, don't you?! Oblivious to the ensuing LOLZ heard from around the internets! And apparently, computer pointer hunting is not an uncommon activity for Preying Mantids like this one - just click through to the YouTube page for this video by Bug Girl, and you'll find a few other videos (albeit of poorer quality) of similar mantis on cursor action!
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Nilavi and Madhu's Great Backyard Bird Count 2010
This Friday started for me with my 4-year-old daughter Nilavi jumping up on the bed and shaking me excitedly with: "Appa! Wake up - let's do the bird count!" Lovely way to start the day, eh? So, after I had awakened fully, Nilavi and I grabbed our binoculars and headed out to the back porch, to conduct our very first count for the Great Backyard Bird Count 2010. Not a bad way to start off Darwin Day either!
As a strong enthusiast for citizen science, and founder of the Fresno Bird Count, I am a bit embarrassed to admit that I haven't volunteered to participate in too many such counts myself! Something about being a "professional" ornithologist, I guess... its not a hobby when I'm doing it regularly for my own projects! But when I have such a bright-eyed partner to get me out of bed and out the door, I just might find myself as a citizen scientist more often. Within the next few days, in fact, for Nilavi is keen to count birds on every one of the 4 days of this GBBC, which runs through this long weekend, from Feb 12-15, 2010.
So we did a basic 15 minute count for the first day, focusing on birds within and in the visible vicinity of our backyard. It was far from a dull quarter of an hour, what with a larger than usual flock of American Robins calling and fluttering about the tops of several bare trees, a couple of Northern Flickers tapping along the bigger branches, White-crowned Sparrows singing in the brush of a neighbor's yard, and a flock of Cedar Waxwings bejeweling the tree crowns! We counted a total of a dozen species, and a short while ago, entered our data into the GBBC database. Here's our complete checklist:
California Gull - 15
Mourning Dove - 8
Northern Flicker - 2
Western Scrub-Jay - 2
American Crow - 2
American Robin - 22
Northern Mockingbird - 1
European Starling - 3
Cedar Waxwing - 25
Yellow-rumped Warbler - 1
White-crowned Sparrow - 4
House Finch - 5
And later, I managed to capture the above images of some of the birds. How was your GBBC experience?
Friday, February 12, 2010
Biology faculty meeting turns deadly in Alabama...
This one hits a bit too close... I am stunned. As a biology faculty member myself, and one who is currently up for tenure, I am really shocked by what happened in the University of Alabama in Huntsville earlier today. I did not know any of the biologists involved, but won't be surprised to find someone just a couple of degrees of separation away. So I can't help but think about what the survivors and the victims' families are going through tonight, and would like to offer them my condolences, empty as that gesture may seem. The academic world (and blogosphere) is no stranger to the stresses of the tenure track, not to mention the usual publish/perish existential dilemmas and anxieties of life in the universities - particularly now when the economy is in such bad shape. There are the rare stories of graduate students attacking faculty members, and of students or faculty committing suicide. But never anything like this - a faculty member apparently going "postal" (to borrow that overworked cliche), committing mass murder! I guess we'll hear a lot more about this in the coming days... although the cable news channels seemed surprisingly devoid of coverage this friday evening (although I did find this video of a press briefing). We have our departmental faculty meetings on fridays too, and sometimes they may seem interminable, but I'll take the tedium over this kind of excitement any day. Having seen (in the mirror, sometimes) my share of stressed out / neurotic / manic-depressive professors, scientists, and graduate students, I feel a mix of horror and fearful curiosity about what went down there in Huntsville, and what may have caused it. What a sad note to end this Darwin Day. Here's an excerpt from the latest New York Times report, with some emerging details:
The Huntsville Times, citing a university official, reported that a biology professor was being held in the shooting. According to a faculty member, the professor had applied for tenure, been turned down, and appealed the decision. She learned on Friday that she had been denied once again..
The newspaper identified the professor as Amy Bishop, a Harvard-educated neuroscientist. According to a 2006 profile in the newspaper, Dr. Bishop invented a portable cell growth incubator with her husband, Jim Anderson. Police officials said that Mr. Anderson was being detained, but they did not call him a suspect.
Photographs of a suspect being led from the scene by the police appeared to match images of Dr. Bishop on academic and technology Web sites.
Dr. Bishop had told acquaintances recently that she was worried about getting tenure, said a business associate who met her at a business technology open house at the end of January and asked not to be named because of the close-knit nature of the science community in Huntsville.
“She began to talk about her problems getting tenure in a very forceful and animated way, saying it was unfair,” the associate said, referring to a conversation in which she blamed specific colleagues for her problems.
“She seemed to be one of these persons who was just very open with her feelings,” he said. “A very smart, intense person who had a variety of opinions on issues.”
The shooting occurred in the Shelby Center at the university around 4 p.m., officials said. Few students were in the building, and none were involved in the shooting, said Ray Garner, a university spokesman.
Officials said the dead were all biology professors, G. K. Podila, the department’s chairman; Maria Ragland Davis; and Adriel D. Johnson Sr. Two other biology professors, Luis Rogelio Cruz-Vera and Joseph G. Leahy, as well as a professor’s assistant, Stephanie Monticciolo, are at Huntsville Hospital in conditions ranging from stable to critical.
via nytimes.com
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Afghanistan defeats the US comprehensively!!
via cricinfo.com
In a vital game of cricket, that is... not a sport anywhere near the heart of mainstream America, but one where, nevertheless, the US team should be expected to do better given the number of cricketing immigrants in this country. But they were up against an inspired Afghanistan team - and I wonder if the real conflict both countries are engaged in provided some needle to the contest - who beat them comfortably to get closer to reaching a World Cup next year! Go Afghanistan!
And the Americans must love this quote from the main Afghan bowler:
Hamid Hassan: 'I think that there is a similarity in the story of Rocky and the Afghanistan cricket team - we both started at the bottom and gradually made our way up the rankings'
Gotta love that!
My blog's strange phylogenetic origin in the Carnival of Evolution #20!
Skeptic Wonder has one of the more creative analytical takes on hosting a blog carnival I've ever seen - an actually phylogeny of the blog posts included in the carnival, based on sequence alignment of each blog post's URL! I'm not sure about some of the results, however... check out where my post on the challenges of teaching evolution ended up in the above tree! How on earth did I end up paraphylizing (if that's a word) Bjørn Østman's blog?!
But, never mind that, this 20th edition of the Carnival of Evolution has plenty of good stuff to read, so head on over there in your spare moments. And pardon my tardiness in bringing this to your attention.
Watch out for some Cosmic Variance in the Colbert Nation soon
If you've been reading my blogs for a while, you know my penchant for posting videos of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart interviewing various scientists. I love that geeky/nerdy side to their shows, and really enjoy how they interview scientists and scholars with their unique blend of the serious and the hilarous. I imagine it is not easy to be the interviewee in such a situation, especially with the quicksilver Colbert who can make anyone squirm! We'll soon have an opportunity to see astrophysicist, writer, and blogger Sean Carroll in the hot seat being nailed by Colbert:
Every scientist who writes a popular-level book harbors a secret (or maybe not-so-secret) ambition: to be invited on the Colbert Report. Not only because Stephen Colbert is a funny guy, and it’s a good way to sell books — although there is that. The truth is that Colbert (and the Daily Show) love talking to scientists. The sad part of that truth is that more people are exposed to real scientists doing cutting-edge research by watching Comedy Central than by watching, shall we say, certain channels you might have thought more appropriate venues for such conversations. But the happy part is that Colbert and Jon Stewart help bring some fun to science, and expose it to an audience it might not otherwise reach.May the nailing be as entertaining as ever, and may the Colbert bump propel Carroll's new book " From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time " into bestsellerhood! In the meantime, visit Cosmic Variance to see a selection of Colbert interviews with some famous physics/astronomy types.
So, mark your calendars: I’m going to be on Colbert on Wednesday, March 3. (Scheduled to be, anyway — updates as events warrant.) I have a book to sell, not that I would have turned down the opportunity otherwise.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
A film screening for Darwin Day
Join us this Friday, February 12, to mark Charles Darwin's 201st birthday with a screening of "Darwin's Darkest Hours". Screening will be in Science II, room 109, at 3:00 PM, and will be followed by a discussion. You can download the poster below.
Read more...
Monday, February 8, 2010
Biography of Charles Darwin | Janet Browne's Stanford Lecture
LECTURE DESCRIPTION
Dr. Janet Browne presents a biography on Charles Darwin and explores Darwin's Origin of Species. The lecture is concluded with a panel discussion with Craig Heller and Robert Proctor.
This is the third lecture in the Stanford course on Darwin's Legacy I've been sharing here recently (see parts 1 and 2), and is a good one to start off this week with, as we prepare to celebrate Darwin's 201st birthday next Friday. Janet Browne, of course, is the author of what may be the definitive biography of Darwin, published in two volumes: Voyaging and The Power of Place. Click on those links to pick up your copy if you haven't read them yet - this wonderful biography of a truly remarkable scientist belongs in every respectable library! And I particulary urge those of you who are troubled by evolution and may be suspicious of the old man to set aside your prejudices and read these books to appreciate the fullness of his life and work even if its implications trouble you!
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
The immortal HeLa cells and their source, Henrietta Lacks
via abcnews.go.com
ABC World News aired this story last Sunday, which includes a short interview clip with Rebecca Skloot, whose book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is just hitting the stores. And yes, the woman's name is Lacks - but lame as it seems, the ABC website and video have misspelt it!! The story itself is quite remarkable, and really well told. I will try to post a review of the book here as I'm hoping to finish reading it soon.
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