We have Lewis Black, they have David Mitchell

That Mitchell look
[Via Bad Astronomy]

David Mitchell is one half of the brilliant British comedy team that makes the show “That Mitchell and Webb Look”, which commonly has skeptical themes to its humor. Mitchell has a series of short videos posted on The Guardian, and he made one about global warming that, like everything he does, is fantastic. They don’t allow embedding — hey Guardian, it’s the 21st Century now! — so I’ll just link to it and let you have a look.

[More]

This is a really good video, which is now on YouTube. He presents some actually important insights in how to get people onboard with what needs to be done with climate change:

Somehow, everything sounds great with a British accent. Even rants. His is more understated than Lewis Black’s but no less satirical.

Mitchell is really best know for some of his impromptu rants on some British game shows. Here is a nice one:

Always great to find someone who is brilliant at the art of ranting.

Browsing can be more important than searching

By michale

Twitter Strangers
[Via The Frontal Cortex]

Over at Gizmodo, Joel Johnson makes a convincing argument for adding random strangers to your twitter feed:

I realized most of my Twitter friends are like me: white dorks. So I picked out my new friend and started to pay attention.

She’s a Christian, but isn’t afraid of sex. She seems to have some problems trusting men, but she’s not afraid of them, either. She’s very proud of her fiscal responsibility. She looks lovely in her faux modeling shots, although I am surprised how much her style aligns with what I consider mall fashion when she’s a grown woman in her twenties. Her home is Detroit and she’s finding the process of buying a new car totally frustrating. She spends an embarrassing amount of time tweeting responses to the Kardashian family.

One of the best things about Twitter is that, once you’ve populated it with friends genuine or aspirational, it feels like a slow-burn house party you can pop into whenever you like. Yet even though adding random people on Twitter is just a one-click action, most of us prune our follow list very judiciously to prevent tedious or random tweets to pollute our streams. Understandable! But don’t discount the joy of discovery that can come by weaving a stranger’s life into your own.

I’d argue that the benefits of these twitter strangers extend beyond the fleeting pleasures of electronic eavesdropping. Instead, being exposed to a constant stream of unexpected tweets – even when the tweets seem wrong, or nonsensical, or just plain silly – can actually expand our creative potential.

[More]

This is a great example of how serendipity increases creativity. Rubbing up against different ideas helps us find new ways to solve problems.

I’ve known for years that browsing science articles is better for creating innovative ideas than searching on specific topics. The latter only tells us what we already know. The former exposes us ti things that are unexpected.

One of the ‘problems’ I see often in science is that no one has anytime to browse much anymore. It is so easy to search and there are so many things to search for.

It used to be that in order to stay on top of the field, we would go to the library about once a week and see what relevant journals had come out. We would then browse the table of contents for anything interesting.

I came up with many ideas because I would just come across an interesting article. One of my early papers, involving using a pH shift of the media to induce protein expression, came about because of such a random intersection of my browsing and a paper.

Now, with all the searches going on, researchers no longer really browse, hurting their creativity by not exposing themselves to the unexpected.

Looks like simply finding new Twitter friends could be helpful. I’ll make them scientists, though.

The sort of person that makes being a scientist to incredible

Stephen H. Schneider: A Major Passing
[Via Cliff Mass Weather Blog]

Stephen Schneider and Me in 1974 at NCAR, Boulder ,CO

This is going to be a more personal blog than normal and a sad one for me. Yesterday, Stephen H. Schneider, a very prominent climatologist and someone who had a major impact on my career passed away. Steve was one of the key individuals in bringing the issue of global warming to the world’s attention. There are few scientists who are technically at the top of their field, accomplished communicators of science to the public, and conversant with public policy: Steve was one of the them. He was a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, a winner of the MacArthur “Genius” award, a leading participant of the IPCC deliberations on the science and implications of global warming, and a co-winner of a Nobel Prize. Author of a half-dozen major books and hundreds of research papers.

But as important as his accomplishments were that is not what I want to stress here. Rather, I will discuss my personal account of interactions with him and the major impact he had on my career.

After my junior year as an undergraduate at Cornell I was accepted in a summer internship in scientific computing at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). A major part of the summer was working with an NCAR scientist and I was assigned at random to Steve–an amazingly lucky break for me– not that I knew it at the time. He was fairly new at NCAR, having recently graduated from Columbia in plasma physics, and had moved into atmospheric sciences and particularly climate.

Steve gave me a desk in his office and took me under his wing (see picture above). My project was to reprogram a global climate model he had developed and I dedicated myself to that task, staying up many nights until 2 or 3 AM in the morning. And I loved it. Steve made me feel like an equal and we spent hours talking that summer, both in the office and at social stops at his home. One major topic–the essential role of the public scientist and of communicating science to the public. Even then he was becoming the “go-to-guy” for the national press on climate matters, and the media was constantly calling. Listening to him deal with them taught me so much on being an effective communicator.

The results of that summer work led to a paper on the influence of sunspots, volcanic eruptions and CO2 on climate (published in Science Magazine)–still my number one cited publication. We kept in touch after that program and he invited me to come out to work with for a second productive summer, with the work leading to our second paper, mainly on volcanic eruptions and climate.

His influence on a young impressionable future scientist was powerful–I become intrigued by subject of climate and importantly became convinced that scientists must put considerable energy into communicating their subject to the public for a whole collection of reasons.

[More]

Cliff provides a tremendous insight into why so many of us love science. It is not simply because we get to understand Nature, to gather facts, to publish papers. While important, the real thrill comes from interacting with other people who are just as enthusiastic and who are able to excite us in our work.

Scientists are people and like people, we respond to others we work with. In science, though, there are people who are really, really amazing, having the ability to act in ways that smack of Superman. It is not simply their ability to be incredibly smart on a certain topic; there are millions of smart people.

It is their ability to be brilliant on many topics. And to make others WANT to be brilliant also.

The first true representation of this type for me was Richard Feynman at CalTech. He was simply exciting to be around because his giddy interest in understanding infected everything and everyone around him. But I found many others at CalTech who could do the same thing – Richard Dickerson, Harold Grey, Carter Mead, Ed Lewis, Lee Hood.

When I went out into the research world, I kept running across these types, ones whose view of the world was Cyclopean – as in stature, not number of eyes – compared to mine. But they wanted me to try and follow along.

I did not have much personal knowledge of Steve Schneider. I heard him talk once and ran across his name over the years.

But I can tell from the sorts of descriptions of others just what sort of scientist he was. I am truly sad that he is no longer here to help us all move forward.

We are all better because people like him exist.

Great Britain has it right. America has it wrong.

In the Middle
[Via Sandwalk]

As usual, Canadian opinions lie somewhere between those of Americans and Europeans [Americans are Creationists; Britons and Canadians Side with Evolution].

Oh well, it could be worse.

---

[More]

We get these sorts of polls all the time so seeing just how awful America does is not all that new. But comparisons to other similar countries is pretty enlightening. Almost 3 times as many Americans as British believe that God created humans within the last 10,000.

No matter how much empirical evidence exists that the world is more than 10,000 years old, that we have been around much longer than that, almost a majority of Americans chose the factually incorrect answer.

Reading the poll results themselves is even more interesting. Only in the Northeast does the point of view that humans evolved hold sway over the belief of special creation – at 47-35%. A majority of people over 55 (51%) believe in something for which there is not only not any evidence but for which all the available evidence points to the opposite conclusion.

Now, the really interesting thing is the different regions of England and how they feel. No, they all know that humans evolved, but London has the lowest percentage – 58%. In fact, Scotland actually has the largest number of people with a real connection to verifiable facts – 75% know humans have evolved and only 12% believe we have only been here 10,000 years.

England has done a much better job educating it people, providing them with an understanding of the facts regarding the origin and development of humans on Earth. Same with Canada.

Perhaps we should adopt their education system, since it seems to do such a better job? Assuming that factual education is really what people in America want.

Web 2.0 community dynamics

[A longer version of this appears at SpreadingScience]

by o palsson  

Bora and PalMD leave ScienceBlogs: What to do now?
[Via Respectful Insolence]

I can’t believe it.

I really can’t believe it.

I really, really, really can’t believe it.

Bora has left ScienceBlogs.

Readers of just this blog probably don’t know what a body blow that is to the ScienceBlogs collective. Readers of multiple ScienceBlogs probably realize that Bora was the proverbial heart and soul of ScienceBlogs. It’s news that’s left Isis the Scientist speechless and GrrlScientist “deeply upset.” Even ScienceBlogs’ big macher PZ Myers has pointed out how Bora compared the situation here to to Bion’s Effect, where the departure of a few people at a party triggers a sudden end to the event. I don’t know whether Bora’s departure is the seismic shift that leads to the collapse of Sb or not, but I do know that it’s a wake up call to me that maybe I was too quick to go back to business as usual after our corporate overlords decided to invite a corporate blog to be added to the Sb stable as co-equals with the rest of us, hopelessly blurring the line between content and advertising.

Why is this such a big deal?

[More]

A few days ago, I discussed how an ad hoc community – the Tour de France peloton – controls group behavior. I also made a mention of how the group deals with perceived outside interference. In the case of the Tour, the peloton adopted a behavior that benefited the group, to the detriment of individuals or the outsiders.

Here, we also see some behavior dealing with external interference. In this case, it was the inclusion of a blog that was bought by a corporation in order to provide its own views, without any real communication with the community about what was happening.

The group did not take well at all to this event at all. Read Bora’s post to get an idea of what happened and why these responses are being made.

What we have here is somewhat the opposite of the group coming together and getting stronger in response to outsiders. The group is, in response, may breaking apart. In part, this may be due to the particular instance – the inclusion of a new member actually undercut the entire reason for the group to exist. But it is also due to the same technologies that make it so easy for ad hoc groups to form.

Scienceblogs is a great example of the benefits and perils of technology. Ad hoc groups can be created very easily. Seed Media did this and worked to create a community that would support and attract people who would allow it to stay in business.

Now it appears to have messed things up by forgetting that in a Web 2.0 world, the community must be served first or it will leave.

[More]

Nokia behind the curve

N97 reception video added to Apple’s antenna site as Nokia seeks new CEO
[Via AppleInsider]

Apple has added another smartphone to its list of devices that experience reception issues when held improperly, this time showing a Nokia N97 mini losing signal.

[More]

As Apple continues to demonstrate the attenuation of other cellphones, Nokia appears to throw in the towel and is looking to get fresh blood. I wonder who will want to take that turnaround on. Not a classic one, where there are lots of losses.

But a turnaround of innovation. Or at least perceived innovation.