Scientific information must be free! Now where to put it…

Do you read the ‘supplementary information’ in science articles? If you’re familiar with the way journal articles work, they publish a traditional and formally formatted article in the print version of the journal, but now they often also have a supplementary information section stored in an online database that contains material that would be impractical or impossible to cram into print: raw data, spreadsheets, multimedia such as movie files. This is important stuff, especially if you want to dig deeper or re-analyze or otherwise rework the information.

Another important function is, I think, preserving data. In a previous life, I moved into an old lab that was piled high with the cluttered debris of the previous tenant’s scientific career; some we boxed up and moved to a storage space (where it is probably moldering, untouched since the early 90s) and the remainder found a resting place in a dumpster. I felt terrible about that, but it was a necessity.

Maybe it won’t always be such a necessity, though. The ‘supplemental information’ section of science papers represents a way to archive data that would otherwise lie in heaps at the bottom of file cabinets until lost. Those sections have their own problems—’supplemental information’ is an amorphous category that can contain anything, is clearly going to require some kind of formal metadata support, and is going to be a storage headache for publishers. We might also wonder whether the big publishing companies are also the appropriate repositories for what ought to be publicly accessible data.

One other possibility is storing raw data on these growing free databases. YouTube is essentially a free database specifically for storing any (almost) video data — I’ve seen some scientific work tucked away there, although it also creates new concerns: resolution is limited, you never know when the YouTube management might decide they dislike you and throw away your work, and a lot of raw scientific data isn’t going to have a large audience and therefore isn’t going to draw in a lot of ad revenue. Another interesting possibility is Google Base. Did you know that Google is providing a free online database in which you can store just about anything? Free storage, public access and searching, a reliable host — it’s a wonderful idea, as long as you don’t mind Google owning all of the information in the world.

Besides, it’ll put Lileks in such a snit

The residents of Fargo have had to put up with one of those Ten Commandments monuments for a long time (well, “put up with” may be the wrong phrase—it’s North Dakota, after all). Now in a smart move, the Red River Freethinkers, who have to be especially canny to live in the Dakotas, are proposing a fair alternative to getting rid of the dodgy nonsense of the Ten Commandments: they’re proposing to put up their own monument to secularism.

Once it goes up, we ought to start a betting pool on which one gets vandalized first, and how long it will be.

What’s the matter with Colorado?

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Some commenters wondered if the Ken Poppe mentioned in the previous story was the same Ken Poppe who wrote a creationist book, Reclaiming Science
from Darwinism. Yes, it is. He’s at Trail Ridge Middle School, a public school in Longmont, CO, and is listed as teaching 6th grade science. He freely admits to teaching creationist crap to his class, and says that the book grew out of his lessons.

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Another bad teacher

Here’s a newspaper article about a classroom debate on global warming. Class debates are good, I think — they get the students thinking about the evidence and working over how to present it persuasively, although I also think it’s up to the instructor to provide some guidance. Realistically, sixth graders aren’t going to have a good handle on either the facts or the theory, and it’s up to the teacher to give them the battery of data they’re going to use to make their arguments. And sometimes it can go wrong.

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I’m so sorry, Florida

Minnesotans are going to be apologizing for this for a good long while (Why? Because we’re so darn nice and we hate to see pain inflicted on others). Cheri Yecke is clawing her way to greater responsibility in the Florida educational system.

On the other side of the equation, state K-12 chancellor Cheri Yecke has announced that she will seek the commissioner’s chair.

Yecke, who has led the education departments in Virginia and Minnesota, came to Florida two years ago, abandoning a run for Congress in Minnesota.

“The whole battle about standards and accountability was fought and won here a long time ago,” Yecke told Times. “Folks in Florida are moving forward in a very positive way. To me, that is just so refreshing. I would like to stay here.”

Yecke was head of our state education department for a time. She’s a creationist sympathizer with a sneaky, conniving way of weaseling the intelligent design agenda into the school curriculum. Floridans, you don’t want her running your education system. You might want to think instead about passing a law not allowing Yecke to approach within 30 yards of any school.

Greg Laden comments on our Yecke history, too. We were scarred, I tell you, scarred.

Pregnant? Feeling bloated?

Here’s a picture to make you feel relatively fortunate, from the April 2007 issue of Natural History:

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Naked mole rats are odd little mammals in which only the queen of the colony gets to breed. The point of this picture is that even when not near the end of their term of pregnancy, they are recognizably distinct from other rats in the colony — they tend to be much longer. The reason is that the hormones during pregnancy, and probably also the physical stresses on their body, induces the lumbar vertebrae to actually grow longer. Humans, fortunately, do not grow a couple of inches vertically with each child.

Man Thru History

I was asked my opinion of this strangely engrossing drawing titled “Man Thru History”. It’s one of those huge multi-paneled works with lots of little details that draw your eye in—I looked everywhere for Waldo but couldn’t find him. Anyway, here’s one panel out of 23:

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While the details are fun to pore over, I can’t say that I’m impressed with it overall. There are too many distortions.

  • Start with the title: “Man thru history”. That’s actually accurate, in a sense. It’s an illustration of a particular man’s perception of history.
  • While most of the figures are just standing, men are either committing violence, having violence done to them, or having sex. The only active women are having sex.
  • There’s an awful lot of pink. Should it have been titled “White Man Thru History”?
  • Everyone is conventionally attractive: slender, curvy women and muscular, athletic men. They’re also all clean and youthful. Where’s the variation in body type and age and race?
  • It’s actually not very representative. There should be more people suffering from disease, more women the target of violence, and lots of dead babies.

Anyway, it’s got next to nothing to do with history. Maybe it should have been titled “Comic book artist practices figure drawing.”