Uncategorized – Page 55 – Southern Fried Science

Weekly does of TED – Mike Rowe celebrates dirty jobs

February 11, 2011February 17, 2011 Andrew Thaler 2 Comments

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This is a major departure from the type TED talks we usually post, but it touches on many themes I think about all the time. We talk a lot about regulations, safety protocols, and best practices. But regulations and protocols are not always the best, safest, or most humane methods available and the people actually … Read More “Weekly does of TED – Mike Rowe celebrates dirty jobs” »

SFS Gear Reviews: When the current changes, you have to adapt – Digipower Universal Travel Adapter

February 10, 2011February 10, 2011 Andrew Thaler

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For a prolonged tour in the field, the little things matter just as much as the big things. And nothing is smaller or more easily forgettable than the lowly travel adapter. I picked mine up in an airport somewhere in Japan as an afterthought, like many travelers, once I got to my destination and realized I had no way to charge up my netbook.

The travel adapter seems inconsequential, but choosing the wrong one can be fatal. I got lucky, because the only one in stock turned out to be a workhorse, but horror stories abound of the unsuspecting graduate student plugging their vital equipment into a suspect outlet and frying a computer, blowing a critical sensor, or setting their shack on fire. Electricity is not to be taken lightly.

Biodiversity Wednesday: Ngorongoro Crater

February 9, 2011February 9, 2011 David Shiffman

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Located in the East African nation of Tanzania, Ngorongoro Crater (pronounced just like it’s spelled, 😉 ) is one of the coolest places I’ve ever had the privilege to visit. Technically a caldera, the remnants of a collapsed volcano, the floor of Ngorongoro provides over 100 square miles of habitat surrounded by steep walls to more than 25,000 animals.

ngorscenery — Ngorongoro Crater- what looks like mountains in the distance actually surrounds the habitat. Photo credit: David Shiffman, 2001

Reader Survey Closed

February 7, 2011February 7, 2011 Andrew Thaler

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A big thanks to everyone who filled out the readers’ survey. We’ll pick and inform the winners tonight and have a full write-up of the survey results later this week.

Finding Melville’s Whale – Moby Dick (Chapter 41)

February 6, 2011February 6, 2011 Andrew Thaler 2 Comments

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After reading some of the reviews from our Readers’ Survey, many people list these among their favorite posts, while many others consider them their least favorite. So, we’ve decided to change the posting schedule for Finding Melville’s Whale. From now on, one or two new entries will appear every Sunday, instead of Tuesdays and Thursdays. We … Read More “Finding Melville’s Whale – Moby Dick (Chapter 41)” »

Weekly dose of TED – Barbara Block: Tagging tuna in the deep ocean

February 4, 2011February 4, 2011 Andrew Thaler 1 Comment

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Tuna are rather magnificent fish. Do you still eat tuna? Why or why not? Do you draw a line at different species?

Biodiversity Wednesday: Great Smoky Salamanders

February 2, 2011February 1, 2011 Bluegrass Blue Crab 2 Comments

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The Great Smoky Mountains are one of those places of wonder right in our own backyard. Not only have the coal and timber communities cultivated the banjo, bluegrass, and moonshine, but they are one of the most unique habitats in the world due to their forest canopy chemistry. As one of the oldest mountains chains on earth, their caps are often rounded and covered in trees, providing sheltered habitat at a variety of altitudes for critters great and small. In fact, it’s the small ones that actually deserve the most notoriety – the mountain chain boasts the highest diversity of amphibians in the world and herpetologists travel long distances to find the many salamanders hiding under the Smokies’ logs and leaf litter. This kind of refuge is increasingly important in the struggle to keep amphibians alive.

State of the Field: Policy is not just for policymakers anymore

February 1, 2011 Bluegrass Blue Crab 1 Comment

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Schwarzenegger_at_Town_Hall — Even the Governator believes in public participation, thanks cdcr.ca.gov

Continuing this series’ recent theme of ways to make policy work, let’s consider a broader view of what policy is and therefore who gets to create policy. It’s not just the elected officials with legislation in their job description. For one, those people are accountable to the people who elected them. Second, formal written policy is not the only kind that is effective – informal rules, community traditions, and other forms of policy are often best. Plus, these types of policy offer the general public a change to be involved in creation and implementation.

There is a large literature on the value of participation in policymaking, especially in fisheries (Silver and Campbell 2005). Here I will focus on three particularly important aspects of participation to management at the scale of an estuary, where I work: a) additional knowledge creation, b) community buy-in, and c) tighter feedback loops. These are important for relatively large-scale systems with several communities and many variables that could affect management.

Ethical Debate: Clean Energy and the State of the Union

February 1, 2011January 30, 2011 David Shiffman 7 Comments

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I’ve been critical of President Obama’s policies concerning science, technology and education in the past. I think he uses a lot of great-sounding rhetoric, but I have yet to see very much in the way of actual results. Despite lofty promises about climate change, we remain without a cap-and-trade system or any sort of meaningful response plan. To make things worse, the administration recently fired their primary adviser for climate change policy. Is all hope lost? Perhaps not.

Great Diagrams of Science: It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s… a really bad drawing of a bird.

January 28, 2011January 28, 2011 David Shiffman 2 Comments

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The latest edition of my Great Diagrams of Science series comes from a field near and dear to my heart- using stable isotope analysis to map a food web. Japanese scientists Wada, Mizutani, and Minagawa got the opportunity to study the feeding ecology of penguins in Antarctica, and were some of the first researchers to use stable isotopes for food web analysis. To travel so far and use what was at the time (1991) state-of-the-art technology, they must have received an impressively large grant. Their results played a part in revolutionizing how scientists study food web interactions, so the grant money was well spent in that regard.

However, it seems that none of it was spent on graphic design: