Kevin Drum commented on a charter school study a couple of days ago, which made me go look through the report (available from this ultra-minimalist page— seriously, you can’t even be bothered to cut and paste some of your introductory boilerplate into an HTML file to give people an idea of what’s behind those PDF… Continue reading Charter School Study Oddities
Author: Chad Orzel
Inflatable Space Elevator, Eh
(Alternate post title: “Hey to James Nicoll”) Via John Dupuis, our clever neighbors to the North has come up with a possible (partial) alternative to rockets: “For decades, scientists have been grappling to find a more efficient means of getting payloads into space,” says Brendan Quine (right), professor of space physics and engineering in York’s… Continue reading Inflatable Space Elevator, Eh
links for 2009-06-18
Miracle Diet Through Physics! : Built on Facts "This immediately suggests a tempting diet plan, if not a very lucrative one: drink lots of cold water. Your body burns calories warming up the H2O, you lose weight without much effort. Plausible?" (tags: science food blogs physics built-on-facts) Career Advice: Fast Tracking a Ph.D. – Inside… Continue reading links for 2009-06-18
New Adventures in Retail
Over at Tor.com, they’ve unveiled the new Tor.com store, enabling you to buy your books via your favorite SF publisher. It’s pretty bare-bones at the moment, so the most worthwhile feature is probably the special picks feature, where they collect together lists of books recommended by their most popular bloggers. Such as, for example, Kate’s… Continue reading New Adventures in Retail
New Grants Program for Solar Energy
Whether because I’m a blogger, or because I’m a previous recipient of their money (I suspect the latter), I recently got email from the Research Corporation announcing their new Scialog 2009: Solar Energy Conversion program: Scialog will focus on funding early career scientists and building research teams to undertake groundbreaking studies in solar energy conversion.… Continue reading New Grants Program for Solar Energy
If It’s Not Boring, It’s Not Art
One of the PDF-only studies that I complained about earlier is a hand-wringing report from the NEA on how public appreciation of art is on the decline. As summarized by Inside Higher Ed: Compared to the NEA’s 1982 survey, the steepest decline was in ballet, which that year was seen by 11.0 percent of college-educated… Continue reading If It’s Not Boring, It’s Not Art
The PDF Plague
There have been a half-dozen stories in the past few weeks that looked interesting, but didn’t even make it into the Links Dump for the day. Why not? Because the stories or studies were only available as PDF files. I have no idea if this is actually getting worse, but I’m finding this more irritating… Continue reading The PDF Plague
Prizes for Science and Journalism
Two announcements landed in my Inbox yesterday and are worth passing along: 1) The Bastiat Prize for Online Journalism is now accepting nominations: # Articles must have been published for the first time between 1 July 2008 and 30 June 2009. # Entries must state clearly the website where each article appeared and the date… Continue reading Prizes for Science and Journalism
links for 2009-06-17
World Science Festivities | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine "Iâm back from the World Science Festival, which was a rousing success, leaving thousands of smiling attendees chattering excitedly about the mysteries of the universe as they dispersed through the streets of Manhattan. So naturally I want to talk about how it could be improved. Writing… Continue reading links for 2009-06-17
Comment on Commenting
The recurrent timeout problem in the comments has been dragging on and on, but I’m not sure how much of a problem it is for you, the end user, as opposed to me, the guy who has to endure six timeouts while clearing out Turkish dating service spam. Of course, I can’t very well ask… Continue reading Comment on Commenting