Category: Links Dump

bs / 17 / 03 / 2009 / News / Home – Inside Higher Ed "[A] panel at the annual meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication considered the question of “Empty Rhetoric and Academic Bullshit: Strategies for Composition’s Self-Representation in National Arenas.” In the discussion, participants differed on how much of a… Continue reading links for 2009-03-18

The Mid-Majority: The Court and the Conference Room   "Back when I was in college, there wasn’t a day I loved more than Selection Sunday. I would sit in front of the television as the details were leaked out, tried to keep up by scratching excited team acronyms and codes on my blank bracket. I… Continue reading links for 2009-03-17

Book Vs. Film: Watchmen | Books | A.V. Club Moore and Gibbons vs. Zach Snyder (tags: comics movies literature books avclub) First Lensman (1950), by E.E. “Doc” Smith | Books | A.V. Club "First Lensman combined a lot of elements that, over the course of reading classic science fiction, have come to drive me nuts:… Continue reading links for 2009-03-16

Cocktail Party Physics: measles, mumps, rubellaor autism "Let me throw just a few statistics at you, just to illustrate how important vaccines have been in the increasing quality of public health in the US alone. * The incidence of polio dropped to nearly zero by 1960 (polio vaccine introduced in 1955) * Measles cases dropped… Continue reading links for 2009-03-15

The Washington Monthly "Watching the evisceration, I couldn’t help but wonder why it takes a comedian on Comedy Central to do the kind of interview the non-fake news shows ought to be doing. When the media establishment marvels at Jon Stewart’s popularity, they tend to think it’s his humor. It’s not. It’s because he calls… Continue reading links for 2009-03-14

Spaceflight Now | Breaking News | Did the Phoenix spacecraft find liquid water on Mars? Maybe. (tags: science astronomy news space planets) How Vise Grip Pliers Saved My Life – Stories about How Vise Grips is a Toolbox Hero – Popular Mechanics "Can Vise-Grips save a life? Sure, and they can replace a stick shift,… Continue reading links for 2009-03-13

Matthew Yglesias » The DC Voucher Program Has Nothing to Do With Sidwell Friends "Virtually none of the recipients of the DC voucher program could go to Sidwell Friends like Barack Obama’s kids. For one thing, they couldn’t get in. And for another thing, they couldn’t come close to affording the tuition. But the former… Continue reading links for 2009-03-12

Science in the open » Why good intentions are not enough to get negative results published "The fundamental problem is that the “we need a journal” approach is stuck in the printed page paradigm. To get negative results published we need to reduce the barriers to publication much lower than they currently are, while at… Continue reading links for 2009-03-11

The Business of Academic Publishing "This statement by Deutsche Bank is an astonishing comment on the profitability of the industry. The notion that Elsevier, and therefore the other commercial publishers, add “little value to the publishing process” and cannot justify the high profit margins is significant. This statement by Deutsche Bank, while aimed towards investors,… Continue reading links for 2009-03-10

Michael Faraday, grand unified theorist? (1851) « Skulls in the Stars "The common thread of many of these discoveries is their goal: demonstrating that all the physical forces of nature are but different manifestations of a single, ‘universal’ force. This idea was a surprisingly modern one for Faraday’s time, and is known today as a… Continue reading links for 2009-03-07