Where are Proponents of the Enlightenment?
The place of the Enlightenment in public debate has all but disappeared. Renowned philosophers who do engage with criticism of the Enlightenment, such as Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor, do not catch the imagination of a wide public in the way Foucault did 40 years ago. Even the great scientists of NASA and Caltech, heirs of Isaac Newton, armed with massive modern reams of data, cannot sway the majority of the American public into believing that global warming is man-made. Instead of majo...
notes Bush Administration Science Abuses
After President Bush's 2004 reelection, scientists noticed that the problem was becoming even worse. One example was Bush's appointment of George Deutsch, a twenty-four-year-old Texas A&M University dropout and Bush campaign intern, to a key position in NASA's public relations department. Deutsch set to work muzzling NASA's top climate scientist. James Hansen, once refusing to allow Hansen to interview with National Public Radio because it was "the most liberal" media outlet in the countr...
1 From prohibiting studies that didn't fit their agenda, to refusing to approve drugs approved by the FDA, "faith-based initiatives", etc, etc.
Hubble Ultra Deep Field (UDF) photograph
Here we go again, one of the epic documents of our time, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (UDF) photograph, the deepest look into space ever. A random part of the sky, so small it could be covered by a pinhead held at arm's length. A part of the sky -- as NASA says -- that you'd see looking through an eight-foot-long soda straw. A photo exposed over 400 orbits of the Hubble, a total exposure of 11.3 days. The telescope pointing precisely to the same point in space even as it whizzes around the Ear...
1 It would take 12.7 million such photos to cover our night sky, and there are 10,000 galaxies in this image.
Evidence of Global Warming in Just the Past 12 Months
Is the climate crisis real? Yes, of course it is. Pause for a moment to consider these events of just the past 12 months:
• Heat. According to NASA, 2010 was tied with 2005 as the hottest year measured since instruments were first used systematically in the 1880s. Nineteen countries set all-time high temperature records. One city in Pakistan, Mohenjo-Daro, reached 128.3 degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest temperature ever measured in an Asian city. Nine of the 10 hottest years in history h...Al Gore summarizes extreme weather events and other natural phenomena as a result of Global Warming from just the past year.
Neil deGrasse Tyson on NASA Funding
First of all, let's clarify what the NASA budget is. Do you realize that the $850 billion dollar bailout, that sum of money is greater than the entire 50-year running budget of NASA?
And so when someone says, "We don't have enough money for this space probe," I'm asking, no, it's not that you don't have enough money, it's that the distribution of money that you're spending is warped in some way that you are removing the only thing that gives people something to dream about tomorrow.
You rem... notesThe economic bailout was more than the entire history of NASA's budget. America is prioritizing toward the next quarter instead of the future.
A 1985 View of Science and Technology in Year 2000
The glib words of years past from our politicians are hollow
nightmares indeed when we are confronted with the staggering
realities of what has to be done. But the key is there--technology,
using it-and we hardly do now. The future may be unpredictable,
but we can make a few well-aimed guesses about what life will
be like in the year 2000. We’ll fly on supersonic transports, or
more likely hypersonic transports, for which the ground work (or
should I call it air work) has already been laid ...Prescient with the qualifier that these things will only happen if America puts emphasis on science and technology education.
Science Works Better than Religion
Religion, magic, science: All assume a reality behind the commonplace that gives meaning and structure to the world, and which might somehow be made to work for our benefit. Thus we have offered prayers, incense, and sacrifice to the gods, cast magical spells and incantations, or built, for example, colossally expensive particle accelerators to probe the inner secrets of atoms and the first moments of the ultra-hot big bang.
To what effect? As for prayer, the gods have been dramatically nonf...If we think of the particle accelerators, NASA, Universities, and other buildings, then cathedrals to science outnumber those to religion, and that is because science produces results.
Notes from the "Science Project Showcase" session
No direct quote for this meme. notesNotes from the various online projects presented in this session.
Karen James
Galapagos Live http://galapagoslife.wordpress.com
· Survival Rival – teens compete against each other to make Darwin videos, winner goes to Galapagos.
· Darwin Online: searches against all of darwin’s writings http://darwin-online.org.uk
· Wanted girls who won the contest to recreate Darwin’s experience, taking notes, but doing so online and uploading photos.
NASA STS-133 Launch Tweetup http://www.nasa.gov/tweetup
· Nasa has over 30 twitter accounts, astronauts tweet live from space.
· People sign up for tweetup, 100-200 are selected, and get a front row seat to the launch
· http://justin.tv/nasatweetup VAB - Vehicle Assembly Building
· Commander of Shuttle is husband of Gabriel Giffords
· Follow @nasa and @nasatweetup – will post link to signup
· Follow #nasatweetup
ISS Wave http://isswave.org
· Heavensabove website: give your location and it will tell you where to look to see the ISS in the night sky
· @twist will send you a tweet when the ISS will pass that night.
· Wouldn’t it be cool to coordinate a mass wave at the ISS around the world. Created a map of people waving at the ISS over the holidays.
· ISS goes around every 90 minutes. Need to see it right at sunset to get the reflection of the suns rays.
· Maybe schedule one for Yuri’s night, this year is the 50th anniversary (April ?DATE?)
Sophia Collins
I’m a Scientist http://imascientist.org.uk
· See Stacy Baker’s Presentation
· Students appear to get invested in scientists, rooting for them the way we root for designers on Project Runway.
· Student’s ask scientists any question they want.
· How hard would it be to set this up with Joomla or Drupal?
· Go to website and look at archive from last year: 6,400 students asking thousands of questions.
· Kids get engaged because of the reversal of power, students get to ask the questions and students get to decide which scientists get to move on.
· 60% of students went on the site in their own time at home.
· Scientists got into it, staying up late making videos
· Scientists can come from anywhere, students are primarily from UK, but other schools can apply
· Majority of scientists are academic
Kristi Holmes
· Semantic web platform to highlight scientists areas of expertise and interests.
· 120 people at 7 different institutions working on it.
· So much information, vivo filters down to meaningful results
· Harvests data from verified sources, uses RDF triples
· For collaboration, finding resources in academia,
· Did a search on biomedical informatics, got a list of potential collaborators
· Profile with data from PubMed, coauthorship record
· Each institution maintains their own data, allowing customization to the institution and what’s meaningful to the organization.
· Open Source: see sourceforge
Adrian Ebsary
Peer Review Radio http://peerreviewradio.com
· Interviews with scientists based around a theme, subjects are given questions before hand
· Encourage students into journalism, teach them writing skills, train students in web design and sound editing skills
·
Rachel Maddow on Obama's First Year
Turns out that a lot of the things that have happened in the lest than two years of this administration are the biggest or first or most important in generations. On the occasion of the Wall Street Reform announcement today, Tagan Godard at CQ politics wrote "Not since FDR has a president done so much to transform this country."
Even before today's historic Wall Street Reform agreement, President Obama of course did what politicians have been trying to do for more than 60 years, he passed He... notes