Category: Links Dump

Best Science Books 2010: The top books of the year!!!! : Confessions of a Science Librarian More good science books than you have time to read. (tags: books science blogs confess-science-lib) Locus Roundtable » The Locus 2010 Recommended Reading List More good SF books that you have time to read. (tags: books sf literature review… Continue reading Links for 2011-02-03

Confessions of a Community College Dean: Meritocracy and Hiring “Is academic hiring meritocratic? The author of this piece assumes that it is. As someone whose job it is to actually hire faculty, I can attest that merit is only a small part of the picture. The single most important part of the picture is the… Continue reading Links for 2011-02-02

Wait, Who Has Sinister Connections to Insiders That Influence Their Reporting? « Easily Distracted “[…]Al-Jazeera! Al-Jazeera, with its mysterious (sinister!) agenda, its undisclosed connections, its desire to influence events! As opposed to what? The New York Times, the Washington Post, the major US TV network news operations, with their still-largely cozy relationship to undisclosed inside… Continue reading Links for 2011-02-01

Rutherford’s alchemy solved Atom’s mystery “He was the first to achieve the alchemists’ dream of changing one element into another, yet he wasn’t an alchemist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry, but he wasn’t a chemist. The work for which he received the Prize was carried out in Canada, but he wasn’t a… Continue reading Links for 2011-01-31

slacktivist: People power in Egypt “We’ve been “promoting democracy” as though the first and most important step involved conducting elections. But the health and success of a democracy isn’t determined as much by the things the public is able to  decide by majority vote as by those things that cannot be voted away. Democracy doesn’t… Continue reading Links for 2011-01-30

The ‘scandal’ of the kilogram (Blog) – physicsworld.com “That’s the name of the game in metrology these days – finding a way of defining mass without just resorting embarrassingly, as we do now, to a lump of metal in the basement of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) outside Paris and saying “that’s… Continue reading Links for 2011-01-29

Promoting Science: MythBusters vs. Sport Science | Wired Science | Wired.com “So, is Sport Science good for science? Is it even science? What about MythBusters? You know it and I know it – I am biased. However, let me pretend that I am not and compare Sport Science and MythBusters in terms of scienceyness.” (tags: science… Continue reading Links for 2011-01-28

The Myth of Charter Schools by Diane Ravitch | The New York Review of Books “If we are serious about improving our schools, we will take steps to improve our teacher force, as Finland and other nations have done. That would mean better screening to select the best candidates, higher salaries, better support and mentoring… Continue reading Links for 2011-01-27

slacktivist: Anti-Missourian best-sellers “When some polarizing figure publishes a book, the sales of that book do provide one useful way of gauging the popularity of that figure or that point of view.[…] But say some less polarizing figure also publishes a book taking the opposite view and it doesn’t sell anywhere near as well. Is… Continue reading Links for 2011-01-26

Swans on Tea » Blogging: You’re Doing it Wrong! (Part III) “Completely unrelated to this was a session called “How Can We Maintain High Journalism Standards on the Web,” and it was attended mostly by the professionals. Most of the session focused on ethics standards and disclosure and avoiding the appearance of bias, which means… Continue reading Links for 2011-01-25