The day’s gleanings

Jerry Coyne relates that Birds are getting smaller.

Most students use Wikipedia, avoid telling profs about it When I talk to writing classes, someone will usually ask if I use Wikipedia. I tell them, “It’s often my first stop — never my last.”

Carl Zimmer has mashed up the data from his clever online survey and brings to us The Science Reader: A Crowd-Sourced Profile. He found that readers are going digital, but not to ebooks, possibly because they still love paper books, and some other good stuff. While Carl’s Mac was crunching the data, he peeked Through the Sexual Looking Glass.

A new paper finds that sometimes Population-level traits affect … invasion success. This is among invasive plants. Fodder for the ongoing debate over group selection.

Ford debuted its new police cruiser. This brought racing to my mind a line from Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. Sheriff Bell’s discussing how some things get better and other things the old stuff works best. That way with cars. His 7-year-old unit, for instance, has the 454, you can’t get that any longer. He drove a new one at the dealer recently but wasn’t impressed. “That car couldn’t outrun a fatman,” said Bell.

As the big vote supposedly nears (haven’t we heard this before?), Sullivan, despite some bumpy road for reform advocates, believes The Momentum Is With Reform.

Which reminds me of something another McCarthy characters, I don’t recall which, once said, which Dems might keep in mind as they face the Vote They Seemed to Hope Would Never Come: “Scared money don’t win.” Or as Margaret Court once said, apropos of Martina Navratilova’s brave (and ultimately effective) net-charging against Chris Evert’s darting passing shots at Wimbledon in 1978, “Fortune favors the brave.” Court wasn’t so nice to Navratilova later. But she read her tennis game well. Martina wore Evert down and won in three sets (2-6, 6-4, 7-5) her first Grand Slam title of many to come. Few players have ever moved with such grace and economy or played more bravely.

Words to live by.

Notables from Out-n-About 03/17/2010 (p.m.)

  • “There are about 1 million veterans of the two current wars in the Veterans Affairs system so far, said Jim McGuire, a health care administrator at the agency. He cited statistics suggesting that 27 percent of active-duty veterans returning to civilian life “were at risk for mental health problems” including post-traumatic stress syndrome.
    Judges have recognized that many of those returning from war are carrying a heavy burden of damage that might not be physically visible. As one federal district judge in Denver, John L. Kane, wrote in an order giving a defendant probation instead of a prison sentence, the soldier “returned from the war, but never really came home.” “

    tags: PTSD, law, crime, blog

  • tags: no_tag

    • “More and more courts are noticing and asserting, in a variety of ways, that there seems to be some relevance to military service, or history of wartime service, to our country,” said Douglas A. Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University and an expert on sentencing.

      At the federal level, judges are bucking guidelines that focus more on the nature of the crime than on the qualities of the person who committed it. States, too, are forming special courts to ensure that veterans in court receive the treatment their service entitles them to.

    • There are about 1 million veterans of the two current wars in the Veterans Affairs system so far, said Jim McGuire, a health care administrator at the agency. He cited statistics suggesting that 27 percent of active-duty veterans returning to civilian life “were at risk for mental health problems” including post-traumatic stress syndrome.

      Judges have recognized that many of those returning from war are carrying a heavy burden of damage that might not be physically visible. As one federal district judge in Denver, John L. Kane, wrote in an order giving a defendant probation instead of a prison

    • The judges’ decisions are part of a broader fight over sentencing, and over once-rigid federal guidelines that tend to punish the crime while giving little weight to the specific circumstances of the defendant. The guidelines explicitly state that “good works” like military service “are not ordinarily relevant” in determining whether to give sentences below the recommended range.
    • The Supreme Court, however, in a series of cases, has declared that the federal sentencing guidelines are advisory, not mandatory. The United States Sentencing Commission is considering proposals that would allow military service or other evidence of “prior good works” to be considered as mitigating factors in sentencing decisions.

      The Supreme Court seemed to signal greater consideration for military service in a decision in November throwing out the death penalty for a Korean War veteran who was convicted in 1987 of murdering his former girlfriend and her boyfriend. Calling for a new sentencing hearing, the justices wrote that lawyers for the defendant, George Porter Jr., should have presented evidence of “the intense stress and emotional toll that combat took” on Mr. Porter, who suffered from “dreadful nightmares and would attempt to climb his bedroom walls with knives at night.”

    • Mr. Oldani spoke with what clinicians call flat affect — an absence of emotion or change in tone — and to Mr. Capece, it seemed clear that “this kid was really messed up by his experiences out there.”

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Patty’s Day Roundup

BoingBoing loves The Open Laboratory: The Best in Science Writing on Blogs 2009, founded/published by the ever-present Bora Zivkovic and edited by scicurious. Nice pointer to four entires on weightlessness, major medical troubles, vampires v zombies, and how poverty affects brain development.  

Slate’s Sarah Wideman reports that Insurance companies deny fertility treatment coverage to unmarried women.

The Bay State’s AG finds that Massachusetts Hospital Costs Not Connected To Quality Of Care

Ezra Klein asks a good question: Was Medicare popular when it passed? Apparently not.

Jeff Jarvis asserts that The building block of journalism is no longer the article. I’m not so sure. But more on that later.

Savage Minds files a long but interesting post on Questioning Collapse, the book that skewers Jared Diamond over his work in “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and elsewhere.

And I found it quite satisfying to read about what Frank Rich reads about.

It was also fun to read, in the same Atlantic Wire series about notable writers’ daily reading, about Susan Orlean’s daily reading, and to see how she came to be on Twitter, where she is now a major force.

Gold in the tweetstream

I’ll try doing this now and then, maybe regularly, to gather the more notable tweets I get in my twitter feed.

Darwin2009: Population-level traits that affect, and do not affect, invasion success http://ow.ly/1mMUp

jayrosen_nyu: “The New York Times is now as much a technology company as a journalism company.” <— Bill Keller http://jr.ly/2pfz

dhayton: “H-Madness” is a new blog on the history of psychiatry, madness, etc. For and by scholars: http://historypsychiatry.wordpress.com/

stevesilberman: The brains of psychopaths may be hypersensitive to dopamine rewards – http://bit.ly/daP9Go     

vaughanbell: Empirical evidence for the extended mind hypothesis. http://is.gd/aBUQm

mocost: Footage from a 1964 experiment testing the effects of LSD on British marines http://j.mp/ayCZpw [you’ll find it almost as funny as they did]

PD_Smith: “From an environmental point of view, dense cities are scalable; Thoreau’s cabin is not.” David Owen http://bit.ly/9HGGvS #city

CliftonWiens: Fantastic review of @lunaticcarl‘s “The Lunatic Express” by @simonwinchester in WSJ: http://bit.ly/9qi0S7. Agree 100 percent!

edyong209: @dgmacarthur savages an appalling op/ed on personal genomics in the Sunday Times http://bit.ly/cwc5J5 Many twists of knife

Maryn McKenna on MRSA, a very troublesome bug

Neither plane crashes nor anti-aircraft fire could kill my namesake uncle, but MRSA did, and it wasn’t pretty. Accordingly I take a particular in this nasty bacteria, and am looking forward to reading Maryn McKenna’s new book, Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA, which I just ordered from Amazon, and which comes out next week.

While you’re waiting to order yours, you can see hear from McKenna about MRSA, and the new strain’s emergence in the daughter of a Dutch pig farmer, in this short video clip:

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Cool/nifty versus funny-smelling/fishy stories: Why we need both kinds

Tyrannosaur-in-F14.jpg

image Bill Waterson

Ed Yong, responding to a run of recent rumination about the nature and role of science journalism, ponders the value of the “This is cool” science story:

None of this is intended to suggest that “this-is-cool” stories are somehow superior to those explaining the interaction between science, policy and society, or what David Dobbs calls the “smells funny” stories. They are simply the stories that I prefer to tell. Individual journalists can specialise in one or more of these areas but across the science writing population, we ultimately need a mix of approaches.

Two points:

Continue reading →

Sharks get a reprieve in the Maldives

201003151611.jpg

The Maldive Islands played a crucial role in Darwin’s long argument about coral reef genesis. It’s nice to see them now play a crucial role in shark conservation by making the entire archipelago — roughly the area of Maine, but warmer and wetter — a shark sanctuary.

From Sharks receive Indian Ocean sanctuary in the Maldives – NatGeo News Watch

The Maldives has become the second nation to proclaim complete protection for sharks in its territorial waters.

The cabinet “decided to enforce the decision on banning shark hunting in the Maldives beginning from 1 March 2010. It was also decided that the Ministry of Fisheries and Agriculture would assist shark fishermen to find alternative livelihood,” the Maldives President’s Office declared in a news statement this week.

From Out-N-About: latest web notables

We’ll start with the science, cruise through J school, and end with healthcare reform or bust.

Genetic material

Willful ignorance is not an effective argument against personal genomics : Genetic Future Mr. McDonald spanks the frightened.

The American Scientist, meanwhile, takes a shot at Putting Genes in Perspective

Culture and the human genome From the excellent A Replicated Typo. (That’s gene humor, is ‘replicated typo.’)

Going to J School

State of the Media, By the Numbers : CJR A review of a review: Columbia Journalism reviews Pew’s “State of the Media” report. Eye-popping numbers and stark statements prevail.

Bora ponders the New science journalism ecosystem. I’m not altogether with him on this, but will lodge those differences later.

Science loses (in the short term — but usually wins in the long term) NeuroDojo takes a clear-eyed look at the growing clamor over how scientists and journalists should respond to bad science journalism and manufactured controversies.

How Ars Technica’s “experiment” with ad-blocking readers built on its community’s affection for the site » Nieman Journalism Lab Ars Technica, playing hardball, put up blank pages for readers who were running blockers. Got a lot of attention, including this (typically sharp) post from Nieman Journalism Lab

The Science Reader: Help Me Draw A Profile | The Loom | Discover Magazine Zimmer asks Dear Reader for help seeing through the fog ahead.

Et alia

Book review: The Open Laboratory Good review of what the editors considered the best of the science blogosphere last year, including one by yours truly, amid much good company.

Home Stretch: Health Care in One Week or Bust | The Atlantic Wire “Or bust.” Worrisome. Atlantic Wire rounds up the prognosticians and handicapping.