AbGradCon 2018

AbGradCon 2018

AbGradCon is an astrobiology conference for graduate students and other early-career researchers. It is intended to provide

a unique setting for astrobiologically-inclined graduate students and early career researchers to come together to share their research, collaborate, and network,

and it’s coming to Georgia Tech next year.

AbGradCon 2018 will be hosted by Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA. The conference venue and attendee lodging will be at the Georgia Tech Hotel & Conference Center. The Technical Program for AbGradCon 2018 runs from June 4-8, while the Proposal Writing Retreat (PWR) will be held on June 1-4.

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Crowdsourcing a movie about media dishonesty regarding science

Brian Dunning’s done some sketchy shit, and he was sentenced to 15 months in prison for it. If you want to know more about that, Rebecca Watson’s scathing rebuke (and links within) is a good starting point. Nevertheless, I still listen to Skeptoid, and I think this new project sounds promising enough that I chipped in ten bucks:

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Review of Biological Individuality by Pierrick Bourrat

Biological Individuality

S. Lidgard & L. K. Nyhart, eds. 2017, Biological Individuality: Integrating Scientific, Philosophical, and Historical Perspectives. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Pierrick Bourrat has reviewed Scott Lidgard and Lynn Nyhart’s book Biological Individuality: Integrating Scientific, Philosophical, and Historical Perspectives for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

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The pitiful cowardice of “fake news”

Donald Trump’s accusations of ‘fake news’ aren’t just disingenuous, they’re cowardly. Some of those accusations are specific, and those are usually smacked down, hard:

Those aren’t the ones I’m talking about. At least, in those cases, he’s making a claim that can be fact-checked. More often, it’s just poisoning the well against (essentially all) legitimate news organizations:

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Nice Aeon article on biological individuality

Siphonophores by Ernst Haeckel

By Ernst Haeckel – Kunstformen der Natur (1904), plate 17: Siphonophorae (see here, here and here), Public Domain, Link

Derek Skillings from University of Bordeaux/CNRS has a new article at Aeon about biological individuality:

For millennia, naturalists and philosophers have struggled to define the most fundamental units of living systems and to delimit the precise boundaries of the organisms that inhabit our planet. This difficulty is partly a product of the search for a singular theory that can be used to carve up all of the living world at its joints.

Skillings reviews the deep historical roots of the question, touching on the views of Charles Darwin and his grandfather, both Huxleys (T. H. and Julian), Herbert Spencer, and other 19th and early 20th century thinkers, as well as some more recent authors, including Daniel Janzen and Peter Godfrey Smith.

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