Filed in Management | Politics | Responsibility | Science | Technology | Transparency
A straight forward view of analyzing data and making your findings visual.
They didn’t mention the part about choosing only the statistics which support your position. Or the section on how to make the data look better or worse. Perhaps it would be a good idea for folks to stop doing that.
Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics.
Filed in Science
Pluto’s Twin, while a neighbor, is a distant one at that. Traveling around the Sun on a more elliptical path than Pluto, Eris’ maximum distant from our home star is 14.5 billion kilometers, almost twice that of Pluto’s path.
An artist’s impression of the dwarf planet Eris.
Illustration by L. Calçada, ESO
Filed in Economy | Efficiency | Energy | Healthcare | International Politics | Kids | Politics | Science | Social | Sustainability | Technology
National Geographic’s most typical person
National Geographic’s year long series on world population highlights the differences and similarities of the Earth’s population as we reach 7 billion people in 2011.
Filed in Biotechnology | Science | Technology
NASA and the journal Nature made announcements this week which increase the odds of life beyond Earth significantly.
NASA’s announcement is the bigger of the two. Scientist’s found life in California’s Mono Lake that is unlike all other known life on Earth. Until now, all life we knew about on Earth was made up of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. A few scientist has suggested there may be other combinations, but we had not found any that did.
Until now, that is. This week, Nasa Announced:
Researchers conducting tests in the harsh environment of Mono Lake in California have discovered the first known microorganism on Earth able to thrive and reproduce using the toxic chemical arsenic. The microorganism substitutes arsenic for phosphorus in its cell components.
Phosphorus is a critical part of cellular structure. It is part of the chemical makeup or RNA and DNA. Phosphorus is required in the molecules for carrying energy in cells. And it is part of the material for cell membranes.
Arsenic is chemically similar to phosphorus. This causes major problems with most life on Earth since it is able to bind with other chemicals disrupting metabolic pathways. While scientist have found microbes which can breathe arsenic, this is the first microbe discovered which is building parts of itself using arsenic.
The search for life beyond Earth has largely focused on looking for the six essential components in an area where they can readily mix as they have here on Earth, in liquid water. Certainly, the search will now go beyond the primary six.
"If something here on Earth can do something so unexpected, what else can life do that we haven’t seen yet?"
- Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a NASA Astrobiology Research Fellow in residence at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., and the research team’s lead scientist.
The announcement just published in Nature and reported in Gizmodo this way, “new observations on the red end of the optical spectrum at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii show an overwhelming population of red dwarfs in eight massive nearby elliptical galaxies. The team has discovered that these galaxies hold twenty times more red dwarfs than the Milky Way.”Van Dokkum says that "there are possibly trillions of Earths orbiting these stars" which are "typically more than 10 billion years old." According to him, that’s long enough for complex life to evolve, which is "one reason why people are interested in this type of star."
Carl Sagan explains why life and in particular intelligent life is more likely with the discovery of more stars similar to our Sun and more combinations for how life can form.
Filed in Environment | Science
Growing up in the South, you don’t have a lot of opportunities to test out your winter gittin’ around skills. And with a big snowstorm about to him my hometown area, here are a few hard learned lessons about moving around in the white stuff.
Cowboy boots and ice don’t mix.
Always wipe the snow off the top of the car door before you open it. Or just wear your rain pants everywhere.
Drive like you’re in your bass boat. Look way out front and pretend you got little or no brakes.
Them big ‘ol four wheel drives are great at getting ya’ going, but ain’t no help at all when it comes to stopping.
And the number one thing to remember: It’s not all about how well you can drive in the snow, it’s more about how the folks around you drive in the snow.
Now that I really think about it, you may want to stay home if you can.
Filed in Environment | Science
The first ever Yellowstone BioBlitz took place in August and uncovered more than 1200 species in a two-square mile area of northern Yellowstone, including several species not previously known to exist in the park. While Yellowstone’s wolves, bison, bears, and elk typically receive the most attention-both from scientists and tourists-the focus of the BioBlitz was on decidedly smaller and lesser-known creatures. Yet to scientists and park officials the findings were no less exciting. Findings included microscopic worms, mushrooms, a bluish-green lichen, a slender grass, and a colorful tiger beetle. 373 plant species
86 mushroom types
46 kinds of bees
5 kinds of bats (I know a 9 year old who would love to see these)
24 butterflies
Over 300 kinds of other insects
This rich biodiversity provides the ecological building blocks upon which the larger, more charismatic mammals depend for survival. The BioBlitz results will help park management better understand ecosystem dynamics and potential threats to ecosystem stability. You can read more about the BioBlitz at the Greater Yellowstone Science Learning Center.
From the Yellowstone Association’s Dec. ‘09 E-Newsletter
Filed in Economy | Energy | Environment | Science
McKinsey and Company’s central conclusion from their U.S. Energy Efficiency report says much about the energy efficiency opportunity in the US:
Energy efficiency offers a vast, low-cost energy resource for the U.S. economy – but only if the nation can craft a comprehensive and innovative approach to unlock it. Significant and persistent barriers will need to be addresses at multiple levels to stimulate demand for energy efficiency and manage its delivery across more than 100 million buildings and literally billions of devices. If executed at scale, a holistic approach would yield gross energy savings worth more than $1.2 trillion, well above the $520 billion needed through 2020 for upfront investment in efficiency measures (not including program costs). Such a program is estimated to reduce end-use energy consumption in 2020 by 9.1 quadrillion BTUs, roughly 23 percent of projected demand, potentially abating up to 1.1 gigatons of green house gases annually.
Unlocking Energy Efficiency in the U.S. Economy – McKinsey and Company
Filed in Healthcare | Science
What a relief. After 15 months of avoiding surgery to repair an increasing hierniation in my neck last week, Boulder Neurosurgery Association performed an Anterior cervical discectomy and fusion.
The outpatient procedure provided immediately relief to pain and numbness down my right arm into my thumb and forefinger.
Filed in Management | Science
“Why do people feel pressure to have an answer for every question?” Even when they don’t know Jack, they make it up on the fly. Ten years ago our training courses included a short video clip of college students at some of the more prestigious universities speaking at length with great confidence about a subject which they obviously knew very little. One episode had students suggesting summer’s were warmer because the Earth had moved significantly closer to the Sun. This video claimed we have been programmed from a very early age to know the answer or make it up. Apparently, some people take to this training better than others. If you really want to know the cause, you’ll need to ask someone else, because I simply do not know.
Filed in Creativity | Education | Science | Technology
Are our schools prepared for the challenges our kids will face this century? This decade? Alvin Toffler suggest our schools were built to prepare the rural American child for the industrial revolution. Get to work on time, enjoy repetitive tasks and essentially fall in line. Agree? Perhaps we have advanced somewhat since the late 1800′s and this seems all too familar to much of the work I recall from oh so many years ago.
Today, when I see our dedicated, hardworking teachers struggle to escape from the bonds of top down driven curriculm, I think there must be a better way.  Here is one alternative.
Future School
You’re talking about customizing the educational experience.
“Exactly. Any form of diversity that we can introduce into the schools is a plus. Today, we have a big controversy about all the charter schools that are springing up. The school system people hate them because they’re taking money from them. I say we should radically multiply charter schools, because they begin to provide a degree of diversity in the system that has not been present. Diversify the system.
In our book Revolutionary Wealth, we play a game. We say, imagine that you’re a policeman, and you’ve got a radar gun, and you’re measuring the speed of cars going by. Each car represents an American institution. The first one car is going by at 100 miles an hour. It’s called business. Businesses have to change at 100 miles an hour because if they don’t, they die. Competition just puts them out of the game. So they’re traveling very, very fast. Then comes another car. And it’s going at 10 miles an hour. That’s the public education system. Schools are supposed to be preparing kids for the business world of tomorrow, to take jobs, to make our economy functional. The schools are changing, if anything, at 10 miles an hour. So, how do you match an economy that requires 100 miles an hour with an institution like public education? A system that changes, if at all, at 10 miles an hour?”
Filed in Economy | History | Science | Technology | USA politics
The excellent series on the History Channel, 10 Days that Unexpectedly Changed America, continues to be very educational and quite entertaining. Watching these 10 events, I feel compelled to add and question if perhaps other unexpected events would be in my top 10. Their events are:
After reading the list, I could not help notice the lack of inclusion of events drawing the US into a war. The sinking of the Lusitania, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the Gulf of Tonkin. While all of these lead to war and perhaps one could predict it, the total cost and impact to the country could not have been known by anyone.
Nothing on this list leads to the US declaring its independence from England. I’m not sure I can point to a single day that led the founding fathers to make that decision and the country to make the required sacrifice. The events that come to mind fill today’s elementary school books. The Shot Heard Round the World, seems to fit the bill. However, this was in volatile New England and may have meant little to a New Yorker or Georgian. Bunker Hill (Breed’s Hill) is another event following the Boston Massacre that could have set the country on a direction of succession.
Economic events include The Federal Reserve, going off the gold starndard and, my favorite, the invention of the semiconductor which has to rank very high in terms of impact to the US and the world.
Filed in Science
Does ice melt due to weight and/or friction of a boot, skate or tire creating a thin layer of water? Experiements are unable to prove this leading some to suggest special qualities of H2O in it’s “solid” form. You can find more in The New York Times article, Explaining Ice: The Answers Are Slippery. Free registration may be required.
The pressure-melting explanation also fails to explain why someone wearing flat-bottom shoes, with a much greater surface area that exerts even less pressure on the ice, can also slip on ice.
Two alternative explanations have arisen to take the pressure argument’s place. One, now more widely accepted, invokes friction: the rubbing of a skate blade or a shoe bottom over ice, according to this view, heats the ice and melts it, creating a slippery layer.
The other, which emerged a decade ago, rests on the idea that perhaps the surface of ice is simply slippery. This argument holds that water molecules at the ice surface vibrate more, because there are no molecules above them to help hold them in place, and they thus remain an unfrozen liquid even at temperatures far below freezing.
In 2002, Dr. Salmeron and colleagues performed an experiment. They dragged the tip of an atomic force microscope, resembling a tiny phonograph needle, across the surface of ice.
“We found the friction of ice to be very high,” Dr. Salmeron said. That is, ice is not really that slippery, after all.
Filed in Science
The Economists in The proper study of mankind writes:
SEVEN hundred and forty centuries ago, give or take a few, the skies darkened and the Earth caught a cold. Toba, a volcano in Sumatra, had exploded with the sort of eruptive force that convulses the planet only once every few million years. The skies stayed dark for six years, so much dust did the eruption throw into the atmosphere. It was a dismal time to be alive and, if Stanley Ambrose of the University of Illinois is right, the chances were you would be dead soon. In particular, the population of one species, known to modern science as Homo sapiens, plummeted to perhaps 2,000 individuals.
The proverbial Martian, looking at that darkened Earth, would probably have given long odds against these peculiar apes making much impact on the future. True, they had mastered the art of tool-making, but so had several of their contemporaries. True, too, their curious grunts allowed them to collaborate in surprisingly sophisticated ways. But those advantages came at a huge price, for their brains were voracious consumers of energy—a mere 2% of the body’s tissue absorbing 20% of its food intake. An interesting evolutionary experiment, then, but surely a blind alley.