Stranger Fruit

The time has come ...

Mon, 18 May 2009 15:00:00 -0500

(I was originally going to hold off posting this until May 31st, but there seems little point)

I've been blogging here at Scienceblogs since January 2006, nearly three and a half years. During that time I have made many good friends - both fellow bloggers and readers - and have enjoyed the support of Seed Media Group. The time has, however, come for me to move on. The reasons are numerous but are also not really worth recounting here.

I do intend to continue blogging and will be found at http://jmlynch.wordpress.com at least for the short term. Hopefully some of you will follow me there.

Thank you for everything.

Some bad news before I go ...

Mon, 18 May 2009 14:32:32 -0500

From a report released by BIO: The Biotechnology Industry Organization:

On average, only 28% of the high school students taking the ACT , which is a national standardized test for college admission , reached a score indicating college readiness for biology and no state reached even 50%.
Only 52% of 12th graders are at or above a basic level of achievement in the sciences, and for 8th graders only 57% are at a basic level of achievement.
Average scores for 12th graders in the sciences have actually declined from 1996 to 2005 and shown no improvement for 8th graders both on overall and the life science component.
A significant gap exists in science achievement for low-income middle-school students, although the gap is slowly narrowing.

Good news before I go ...

Fri, 15 May 2009 21:30:02 -0500

NCSE has announced that two remaining anti-evolution bills have died in committee: Alabama & Missouri.

To recap the year:

Mississippi - dead in committee
Oklahoma - dead in committee
Iowa - dead in committee
New Mexico - dead in committee
Florida - dead in committee
Alabama - dead in committee
Missouri - dead in committee
Texas - in committee

The boys over at the Discovery Institute must be a little down this evening. With a record like that, they are the Detroit Lions of anti-evolutionism.

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Things to do, places to see ...

Fri, 15 May 2009 15:00:20 -0500

Finished grading today, so the Spring semester is finally over. I'm out of here for a few weeks. See you sometime in June.

Simplify

Mon, 11 May 2009 15:01:26 -0500

So I'm trying to simplify things in real life as I think I am suffering from information overload (among other things).

First task was to clean up my Facebook friends. From here on, it's family, colleagues and (usually graduate) students. Folks I know only in virtual space are likely to have gotten bumped. Sorry if you were one of those - truly, no offense was intended. I'm willing to follow folks on Twitter though, so feel free to join that way. Just follow me and I'll reciprocate. There's also Friendfeed.

Second task will be to prioritize regarding blogging. That will involve some thinking and no resolution will be likely for a while.

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2000th Post

Sun, 10 May 2009 23:34:57 -0500

Turns out that yesterday I posted my 2000th post here at Scienceblogs without even noticing it. Heh!

Francis Beckwith, Creationism and ID

Sun, 10 May 2009 22:27:45 -0500

Back in December 2006 I referred to Francis Beckwith as an ID supporter. This resulted in he informing me that he "has never been much of fan [of] design arguments, ever [and that his] interest in the debate focuses on the jurisprudential questions involving the First Amendment and what could be permissibly taught in public schools under that amendment." At that time I retracted and removed any reference to Beckwith as a supporter. More recently, Beckwith has objected to others referring to him as a creationist and an ID supporter. Tim Sandefur has replied, and now Barbara Forrest has offered her reply. You be the judge, but I am now sufficiently convinced of Beckwith's support for ID to retract my original retraction.

On flying elephants

Sun, 10 May 2009 16:00:53 -0500

PZ has the tale of Larry, Moe, Curly, and Eagletosh. Worth a read.

Teaching Evolution One Icon At A Time

Sun, 10 May 2009 00:06:41 -0500

I spent this morning at a workshop for K-12 biology teachers. The workshop was organized by the School of Life Sciences here at ASU and gave some 20 students to interact with faculty regarding teaching evolution. My presentation was titled "Teaching Evolution One Icon At A Time" and aimed to educate the teachers regarding the Discovery Institute's "teach the strengths and weaknesses of evolution" approach post-Kitzmiller. Slides are below:

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Friday Felid #19

Fri, 08 May 2009 06:57:50 -0500

Margay, Leopardus wiedii Schinz 1821

(source)

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"Same old rubbish" from Dembski - film at eleven.

Thu, 07 May 2009 15:46:19 -0500

Mark Chu-Carroll has done it so that you don't have to ... read the Dembski & Marks paper that I mentioned a few days back. Shorter MC-C: "Same old rubbish." Read his full verdict here.

Update (5/11): Dembski "responds" (and apparently cannot bring himself to actually name who makes the criticism) and Mark sets him straight.

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"Biological imperatives trump laws."

Mon, 04 May 2009 11:50:20 -0500

"Biological imperatives trump laws."

Quick ... who said that? Evil Darwinist? Nazi eugenicist? Liberal professor? Nope to all three.

Answer is Orson Scott Card - sci-fi hack, proponent of guiltless genocide, and anti-Darwinist - in a screed against gay marriage. One is left wondering whether rape is OK to Card - after all, spreading your seed is one of those "biological imperatives".

Longer Card:

How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.

Biological imperatives trump laws. American government cannot fight against marriage and hope to endure. If the Constitution is defined in such a way as to destroy the privileged position of marriage, it is that insane Constitution, not marriage, that will die.

(Hat-tip to Ed.)

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Taking over Torpig

Mon, 04 May 2009 02:57:35 -0500

In early 2009, a bunch of folks at UCSB took over the Torpig botnet for ten days. In that time, they observed more that 180,000 infections and recorded over 70G of data that the botnet captured. During that time, over 8,000 accounts at financial institutions were "acquired".

The report is available online [pdf]

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Merck and Elsevier Make A Phony Journal

Sun, 03 May 2009 05:51:09 -0500

The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine is a sham concocted by Merck and Elsevier. See here and here. I'm sure there are some sort of ethical issues here.

Update (5/3): Janet and Isis have more on this. Janet notes:

Myself, I'm not really moved by the claim that publishing standards were so different 6 years ago that Elsevier has clean hands here. It's pretty obvious from this response that Elsevier was happy to take money from Merck to make something journal-like, trading on Elsevier's reputation as a publisher of proper journals. And the "no plans to look further into the matter" comment does not really speak to an awareness by Elsevier that its reputation as a publisher of proper journals is damaged by shenanigans like this.

This is the kind of thing that makes you wonder if the model of journal publishing for profit ought to have a future, at least where scientific and medical journals are concerned.

I think the only recourse here is actually to shun publication in journals owned by Elsevier. Certainly, that's what I will be doing (noting that the big journal in my field - Journal of the History of Biology - is published by them and that I have been working on a manuscript that I intended sending there).

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Humpback Chub Rebound in the Grand Canyon

Sat, 02 May 2009 02:14:06 -0500

My postdoc was spent looking at hybridization between humpback (Gila cypha, above) and roundtail (G. robusta) chub in the Colorado river system (see here for a publication that stemmed from that - perhaps sometime I'll post on that work). My fieldwork was at the confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado rivers where we'd capture, measure, tag & photo the fish. Thus, I'm happy to report the following:

The humpback chub, a closely watched indicator of the Grand Canyon's ecological health, has grown steadily in number since 2001 as changing conditions on the Colorado River have created a more hospitable habitat.

The population of the endangered fish grew by 50 percent over the past eight years, the U.S. Geological Survey reported Monday. By the end of last year, there were an estimated 7,650 adult chub, fish at least 4 years old, near the confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado rivers. That's up from about 4,000 fish as recently as 2000.

More here and here.