What exactly is a doctorate?
What getting a doctorate really means? Matt Might, professor of Computer Science at the University of Utah, offers these graphics to explain conceptually what specialization of knowledge means.
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No Child Left Untableted
Sally Hurd Smith, a veteran teacher, held up her brand-new tablet computer and shook it as she said, “I don’t want this thing to take over my classroom.” It was late June, a month before the first day of school. In a sixth-grade classroom in Greensboro, N.C., a dozen middle-school social-studies teachers were getting their…
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Welcome to the Age of Denial
IN 1982, polls showed that 44 percent of Americans believed God had created human beings in their present form. Thirty years later, the fraction of the population who are creationists is 46 percent. In 1989, when “climate change” had just entered the public lexicon, 63 percent of Americans understood it was a problem. Almost 25…
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Warning Label: Big Pharma meets Big History
Why should Big Pharma invest in Big History? My answer is in the form of a warning label I imagined attached to all pharmaceutical products.
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Science Journalism and the Art of Expressing Uncertainty
Journalism is filled with examples of erroneous reporting turning into received opinion when reporters, editors, and the public take a story at face value after it came from a generally trusted source. Consider, for example, the claims of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, or the various public and corporate scandals where authorities ranging from government…
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It’s Okay To Be Smart
It’s Okay To Be Smart is a blog and a YouTube show about science. But it’s probably not about science the way you’re used to it. From the blogger and host, Joe Hanson, Ph.D: “I have a Ph.D in biology, and my mission in life is to tell the world about the awesomeness of ALL…
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Veritasium
Veritasium is a science video blog featuring experiments, expert interviews, cool demos, and discussions with the public about everything science. Clips featured in this video: Trees are Freaking Awesome – http://bit.ly/TFilQ8 Gyroscopic Precession – http://bit.ly/U4e8HQ Can We Go The Speed of Light? (Principle of Relativity) – http://bit.ly/X1BlXZ Where Does The Sun Get Its Energy?…
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Scientific brain drain – what happens when the pipes are clogged?
A colleague at my institution recently invited a scientist with a “foreign-sounding” name to deliver a seminar. Foreign, yes, but not to my ears – immediately I knew that this was an Israeli. As fate would have it, not only did I recognise the name as Israeli, but I recognised the name – and remembered…
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Science Stakes: Britain’s Crowded Public-Science Scene Must Evolve
Since 1799, the Royal Institution of Great Britain has occupied a grand building in London’s Mayfair, surrounded today by luxury shops and private art galleries. For many years, the building was a central part of British science. Michael Faraday dazzled crowds there in the nineteenth century with pyrotechnic displays of chemistry. In many respects, its…
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Mathematicians Aim to Take Publishers Out of Publishing
Mathematicians plan to launch a series of free open-access journals that will host their peer-reviewed articles on the preprint server arXiv. The project was publicly revealed in a blog post by Tim Gowers, a Fields Medal winner and mathematician at the University of Cambridge, UK. The initiative, called the Episciences Project, hopes to show that…
