Whoa. Giuliani is toast. The guy was using city funds to pay for his gambols with his mistress?
This would be good news if it weren’t for the fact that Huckabee, Romney, Thompson…heck, the whole revolting Republican lineup…make me ill.
Clenched fist salute to Pat Condell:
Exactly.
A pathologist in Ontario made some dreadful, stupid, sloppy mistakes, the kinds of errors that can destroy people’s lives.
The mistakes Smith made in conducting autopsies or giving second opinions on autopsies prompted the province to call the inquiry. His work contributed to some parents or caregivers coming under suspicion or being convicted for the deaths of their children.
It took years and many cases for this guy’s incompetence to be caught out. How could that be?
The lesson is that you should never, ever give a network executive control of your fate.
Those kinds of macabre twists would be Futurama’s undoing. Fox was expecting something familiar, The Simpsons in space. Executives certainly were not prepared for the bizarre contours of Groening and Cohen’s brave new world. “The network’s attitude quickly went from tremendous excitement to great fear,” Groening says. “They were very troubled by the suicide booth. They didn’t like the ‘All-Tentacle Massage’ parlor.”
How can you not like the ‘All-Tentacle Massage’ parlor? Obviously, Groening and Co. should have just sent the execs a two hour preview clip of HypnoToad, and gone ahead and done whatever they wanted.
At least the good news is that Futurama is coming back for one more year.
Last week, I reported on this new breakthrough in stem cell research, in which scientists have discovered how to trigger the stem cell state in adult somatic cells, like skin cells, producing an induced stem cell, a pluripotent cell that can then be lead down the path to any of a multitude of useful tissue types. I tried to get across the message that this is not the end of embryonic stem cell (ESC) research: the work required ESCs to be developed, the technique being used is unsuitable for therapeutic stem cell work, and there’s a long, long road to follow before we actually have stem cell “cures” in hand. A review on LiveScience emphasized similar reservations. Seizing on this one result as an excuse to end research on ESCs would be a great mistake.
So let’s consider what it takes to turn a stem cell into a medically useful tool. One “simple” (we’ll quickly see that it is anything but) example is finding a cure for type 1 diabetes. We understand that problem very well: people with this disease have lost one specific cell type, the β cells of the pancreas, which manufacture insulin. That’s all we have to do: grow up a dish full of just one cell type, the β cells, and plant them back in the patient’s gut, and presto, no more diabetes (setting aside the chronic difficulty of removing whatever destroyed the patient’s original set of β cells, that is). Sounds easy. It’s not.
The seed of this mornings discussion in neurobiology was “Time, Love, Memory” by Jonathan Wiener. As has been the norm in past weeks we met in the on campus cafe bringing along with us four insightful questions each to keep the discussion rolling along throughout the hour. Wiener describes later in his book (p192) the three necessary components of living clocks. Living clocks are the basis of circadian rhythms and must have an input pathway so that the clock can be reset by the sunrise and sunset. A good example of why this is important is that humans actually have a twenty-five hour clock that resets itself everyday to correlate to the actual day length of twenty-four hours (23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.1 seconds for any physicists reading this). People who are blind or people who are not exposed to the sun at all will exhibit a twenty-five hour clock, out of synchronization with the earth’s rotation.
So my question was about animals that live near the poles. How do polar bears or lynxes reset their clocks in the arctic summer when the sun doesn’t set? Some thoughts were that perhaps the living clocks are reset by magnetism but quickly realized that there is no shift of magnetism that corresponds to the length of a day. Another thought was that if it’s always light out, does it matter when the polar bear sleeps? The polar bear could have a period of activity, followed by a period of decreasing activity, and then rest and sleep. Lynxes often hunt at night and rest during the day but if it’s always light out does their clock remain synchronized with the earth’s rotation? PZ mentioned there isn’t much research pertaining to this but If anyone knows of any interesting papers that would enlighten this topic post them up.
References: Jonathan Wiener. “Time, Love, Memory.” Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, Inc. New York. 1999.
Has everyone else heard of the Secret Science Club, though? It sounds a bit like Cafe Scientififique, but with a New York attitude — you lucky New Yorkers ought to go (it’s a bit far for this lucky Minnesotan to make the commute).
It’s got a good writeup in the Gothamist, too. And a nice logo.
Trent Lott may be bailing out of politics, but it looks like his successor may be Chip Pickering, Pentecostal kook who had a brief appearance on Borat. Is it an improvement to replace a mean stupid thug with a religious airhead with a nice haircut?
T. Ryan Gregory has announced that you can now read the inaugural issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach, which includes his own article.
This is the new journal set up by Niles and Gregory Eldredge (father and son) to “provide direct linkage between the worlds of scientific
research and the K-16 classroom.” It is definitely one every science teacher should be watching.
I almost feel sorry for Guillermo Gonzalez. The Discovery Institute is turning him into a political football, and making his denial of tenure a far greater mess than is warranted. They’re going to hold a press conference on Monday.
The fight will rage on over Iowa State University astronomy professor Guillermo Gonzalez, who advocated for intelligent design, the theory that disputes parts of evolution, and lost a bid for tenure.
Advocates for Gonzalez said in a release distributed Tuesday that they will hold a news conference at 11 a.m. Monday in Des Moines. There, they said, they will discuss documents they contend will prove that Gonzalez “lost his job” because he supports intelligent design, not because he was deficient as a scholar. Gonzalez’s backers say an appeal to the Iowa Board of Regents and possibly a lawsuit would be the next steps.
…
The news conference scheduled for Monday at the Capitol will include attorneys for Gonzalez, representatives of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based organization that supports discussions of intelligent design in science classes, and one or more state legislators, staff of the Discovery Institute said.
The most likely result of this caterwauling: no change in Gonzalez’ status at all, and he’ll have to find another job elsewhere. Search committees everywhere, though, will see him as pure poison, a grandstander who will turn every criticism into a public event. He will be known as the Intelligent Design creationist with a team of lawyers.
If by some bizarre stroke of highly politicized luck he is given tenure, he’s going to be the non-collegial colleague who is taking up a tenure line that they could have given to someone more productive. This will not be a happy situation for him or his department.
Gonzalez can’t win in this fight.
The Discovery Institute, though, stands to benefit from turning Gonzalez into a martyr — they’ll be waving the bloody shreds of his career at everyone, blaming the Darwinists, when the real destructive force here is the DI itself. Anyone else in this position would quietly go through internal channels to review the tenure decision, and when that failed, would quietly go about applying for new jobs…with the intent of doing a better job of fulfilling the requirements for tenure at a new position. This situation comes up a lot — tenure approval is not automatic by any means — and you just have to move on. I’ve been there myself.
I suspect, though, that the DI simply sees a state full of presidential candidates and an opportunity to score some political points. We’ll have to tune in on Monday and see if any of them take the bait and try to use a national candidacy to play games with an individual decision by a single university.
