Texas A&M announces a new journalism dean. She's black and she's qualified— and an alum of the school! Ex-New York Times too.
They announce her appointment in a splashy event.
Dark forces of reaction mobilize.
The offer is watered down to one year, with no tenure. She says no way, and withdraws. National news is made. It's negative. And today, the president of A&M resigns!
Gros fil aoûtien en forme de fiche de lecture du livre "Qu'est-ce que la science ?", d'Alan F. Chalmers.
Pourquoi ce fil ? Parce que ce livre éclaire certaines critiques faites à une partie des milieux sceptiques / rationalistes / zététiques, qu'on appelle quelquefois "les zets" regroupée principalement autour de vulgarisateurs et de debunkers sur YouTube.
Hello #Mastodon! I am making the jump from X to here. Too many of my #science and #medicine buddies left X. If you switched from X, how do you like it here? #introductions
I’m fascinated by the role that metaphors play in scientific discovery. Like Darwin’s “tree” of life. When we shift how we think about what we’re working on, sometimes it inspires us to see it in a whole new way that clicks.
Know any good accounts of metaphors in science - others or your own?
Evolution doesn’t look how it’s depicted in pop culture. We often picture the famous “March of Progress” illustration where a series of apes stand in line leading to a modern human.
But evolution is not linear. It branches & divides without an intended direction or endpoint through natural selection.
Alan Turing was a mathematician & cryptographer who was a leading code-breaker in the team that decrypted Nazi Germany’s Enigma machine during WWII. He inspired modern computing & what became AI.
Instead of being hailed as a genius & hero, Turing was convicted as a homosexual & forced to endure chemical castration. He died by suicide at 41 in 1954.
The British government didn’t apologize until 2009 & Queen Elizabeth II finally pardoned him in 2013. #history#science
"Describing [RFK's] views as ‘controversial,’ I think, is dishonest. They’re not controversial. They’re false. He’s not spreading controversial views, he’s spreading lies. And so the framing matters enormously, and that’s something that I foresee being a huge, huge issue in the 2024 campaign."
Agreed!
Some key distinctions made by journalist Seth Mnookin in this sharp interview. (He wrote a book about the anti-vaccine movement in 2011.)
Only three humans have ever witnessed an eclipse of the Sun by the Earth. It happened while the Apollo 12 crew was returning home from the Moon, on November 21, 1969.
Fortunately, the astronauts filmed the moment so you can share in the experience.
That's my shortand for the organizing principle we most need from journalists covering the 2024 election. Not who has what chances of winning, but the consequences for our democracy. Not the odds, but the stakes.
Today the New York Times published an example of stakes reporting:
"Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government...."
Tomorrow, watch Japan's attempt to land their SLIM spacecraft on the moon! The livestream link is below, and the landing will be at approximately 10:20 am ET on Friday, January 19. If they succeed, they will be the fifth country (U.S., Soviet Union, China, India) to accomplish this feat!
About 109 billion people have lived & died. Each grain of sand represents 10 million.
This stunning data visualization of human life by Max Roser was published in 2022.
Today there would be 805 green grains representing 8.05 billion people living on Earth. #science#art
Not sure what those who advocate for the use of ChatGPT in scientific writing have in mind. It is the very act of writing that helps us think about the connections and implications of our results, identify gaps, and devise further experiments and controls.
Any science project that can be written up by a bot from tables of results and associated literature isn’t the kind of science that I’d want to do to begin with.
Can’t imagine completing a manuscript not knowing what comes next, because the writing was done automatically instead of me putting extensive thought into it.
And why would anyone bother to read it if the authors couldn’t be bothered to write it. Might as well put up the tables and figures into an archive online, stamp a DOI on it, and move on.
This is a real piece of Government literature. Repeat, this is not a joke. @jkfanghanel you're even more right than you thought. #UKPolitics#Science#FFS
Today’s reminder that we are still very far from knowing everything: I have just found an odd gap in the scientific literature: the specific mechanisms of generating root pressure in trees and how this relates to the force that tree roots can exert on their surroundings (eg pavements/sidewalks), and what those forces actually are. As far as I can see, having done an extensive literature search, nothing has been done on this since the 1970s. Zilch. Not a sausage. Frustrating! #science#trees
In terms of PhD-ing, this is kind of like the pregame. I passed my comprehensive exams last year & will officially defend my dissertation & finish this Fall. So here goes...
"McCarthy starts to plot Biden impeachment strategy while GOP skeptics remain."
What the GROUNDS for impeachment might be is addressed in paragraph nine. CNN thus buries the lede of a more striking story: a vibes-based approach, where you establish first the feeling, "we wanna impeach," relegating the small matter of "impeachment for what?" to later stages.
That's news! Instead CNN frames for us another strategy story.
Grant-writing question - isn’t it weird / stressful to put all your ideas out there, for a 10% chance to be funded, while at the same time taking the risk that other researchers (intentionally or not) might use these ideas for their own benefit?
(Of course this wouldn’t be a problem if we weren’t all competing with each other.. but we currently are) #Academia#Research#Science#Grants
Physicist Lise Meitner’s brilliance led to the discovery of nuclear fission. But her long time collaborator Otto Hahn, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry without her in 1944, even though she had given the first theoretical explanation.
Born in 1906, computer scientist Grace Hopper invented the first compiler for computer programming language & was among the first programmers of the Harvard Mk1 computer.
Back to the Future's 1.21 gigawatts sounds huge, but is it? We compare different power levels of common objects to see how much energy a gigawatt really is.
How Much Power Is 1.21 Gigawatts, Anyway? The Science Behind Back to the Future (www.syfy.com)
Back to the Future's 1.21 gigawatts sounds huge, but is it? We compare different power levels of common objects to see how much energy a gigawatt really is.