I’ve been getting a new (for me) form of spam lately. I’m used to invitations to submit to predatory journals and to attend conferences for which I have no relevant expertise, but it’s only in the past few months that I’ve been getting invitations to serve on journal editorial boards. For example:
Following up on my earlier post “Sorry about the ads,” I noticed that Mano Singham has also addressed this (“Ads, adblockers, and ‘family friendly content’“):
A project started five years ago has finally borne fruit. In May, 2012 I joined a group of philosophers, historians, and biologists in Philadelphia for the Cain Conference “E pluribus unum: Bringing biological parts and wholes into historical and philosophical perspective.” The meeting was organized by Lynn Nyhart and Scott Lidgard, with the goal
…to pursue the question: How can historians, philosophers, and biologists help each other to understand part-whole relationships in biology, both today and in the past?
I use an ad blocker. Two of them, actually. I’m willing to add a website to my whitelist(s) if their ads aren’t obnoxious, but if it’s flashing in my face, popping up new windows, or autoplaying audio, forget it.
So I didn’t know; that’s my only excuse. I had actually never seen the ads on Fierce Roller until a friend messaged me on Twitter [Pg-13 below the fold]:
Another DJ Volvox
Zach Grochau-Wright, a Ph.D. student in Rick Michod’s lab, sent me a few instances of “Random things named Volvox“. I hadn’t heard of any of these:
Most of the articles published in scientific journals report publicly funded research. You can see this in the acknowledgments section, where the authors list their funding sources, which will often include the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, NASA, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, etc. (this is obviously a US-centric list, but most countries have similar funding mechanisms). Even if the work isn’t supported by a government grant, much of it is done at public universities, meaning that the facilities and possibly researcher salaries are government supported. And government-supported means taxpayer-supported.
When I was putting together my post about Rafatazmia, the 1.6 billion-year-old fossil tentatively interpreted as a red alga, I searched Fierce Roller to see what I had written about Bangiomorpha, the previous record-holder for the oldest red algal fossil. I was surprised to find that I never have published anything about Bangiomorpha. This is a serious oversight!
Bangiomorpha was described by Nick Butterfield back in 1990, from a series of fossils collected on Somerset Island in Nunavut, the northernmost territory in Canada:
Just what the headline says: early registration for The Fourth International Volvox Conference ends May 19th. After that, prices go up $100 for everybody. The registration fees sound a bit steep (up to $650), but when you consider that they include meals, lodging, and transportation between the hotel and the conference, they’re not bad at all:
Yesterday I volunteered as a Meeting Mentor at the AbSciCon meeting. It’s not a big commitment; essentially all you have to do is hang out with a high school student for half a day, going to talks and enjoying the meeting as you normally would.
During a break, I was chatting with my mentee about Betül Kaçar’s research, and he surprised me by pointing out that (as he put it), “Devolution isn’t a thing.” The student I was paired with is interested in physics and space exploration, but his comment showed an insight that not even all professional biologists really own. From what I’ve seen, it’s an insight that very few creationists own.
Yesterday was the first day of AbSciCon 2017 in Mesa, Arizona.
Phoenix is not my favorite town; it’s got all the brutal heat (and then some) that Tucson gets, without a tenth of Tucson’s charm. That said, it’s been fairly pleasant so far, only getting into the 80’s yesterday. The hotel restaurant is pretty lame, but there is decent food about a ten-minute walk away.
Yesterday started with a bizarre plenary talk about planetary protection. This is a big deal in the astrobiology community, the concern that sending probes to potentially habitable worlds such as Europa and Enceladus could contaminate them with Earth life. It’s also a harder problem to solve than it sounds like, partly because advanced electronics of the sort that are likely to run a probe don’t get along well with the things we typically use to sterilize equipment: bleach, extreme heat, radiation, and the like. The talk used a real-time interactive system, allowing the speaker to ask a question and display the results on the screen in real time. Multiple choice questions displayed as bar graphs, fill-in-the-blanks as word clouds, both changing from second to second as new answers came in.