The World's Fair

The Challenge of Eating Sustainably: College Edition

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:15:00 -0500

Is It Possible to Eat Sustainably at the University of Virginia?

Eating sustainably requires (a) that you come to some resolution about what "sustainable" means, (b) that you have the opportunity to choose so-defined sustainable foods, and (c) that the constraints of your lifestyle, geography, and socioeconomic context make it possible for you to pursue such an endeavor. Threading the needle between all of that is tricky business. Thus many have chosen to run experiments about it, or related to the larger theme, defined in various ways: the "week without" processed food; the "week without" plastic; the "year" living on a local diet; the adventures of "No Impact Man." Elizabeth Kolbert reviewed books on that theme in a New Yorker essay at the end of the summer. Some students in a class I teach called "Technology, Nature, and Sustainable Agriculture" (here is the website the class made last semester) are trying it right now.

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If scientists were to write the music reviews (Vampire Weekend case study)

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:30:24 -0500

Science Scout Twitter Feed
Well, actually, mathematicians - but it would probably go like this:

CD Title: Inverse: (Special limited edition release) (2009) Artist: VAMPIRE WEEKEND Rating: 2.718 stars (out of 5) - - -
The rating stands. (Spoiler alert: We rounded.) Actually, we took our cue here from Leonard Euler. Our rating is actually "e," as in the sound of the squeals that will inevitably emanate from the ladies of Cambridge after they all get a hold of Inverse come two months. Yes, M.I.T.'s finest are back with a shtick to shake up the innumerate masses for whom any further mention of the band's album sales sends us critics to sleep, and more than a few of the recent graduates of that other school up the river into jealous fits.

Anyway, you can read the rest here at the SCQ.

p.s. Horchata rocks! And this review is entirely fictional.

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Public Health in the 21st Century: the Open-Source Outbreak

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:13:54 -0500

Science Scout Twitter Feed
I mentioned earlier, about being involved in a great student conference (you know the whole Chewbacca thing). Well, we're starting to roll out the videos online. Here is the first, and it's a great one - worth checking out for those of you into H1N1 and also social media tools.

Dr. Jennifer Gardy, an alumnus speaker at the event, is co-leading the new genome research lab at the BC Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC). She is also known as Nerd Girl from her Globe and Mail blog of the same name. In her talk, Gardy shared how advances in technology have provided increased collaboration on scientific research and scholarly publications -- what she labelled as public health 2.0.
For example, she showed how one publication had 36 authors. After leading the audience through the origins of H1N1, she stated how it only took five days from the sequencing of the virus to the first open-source paper. Gardy ended her talk emphasizing how students should be willing to explore the benefits of Open Access publications, collaborative research, and emerging technologies. (From Phillip Jeffrey's Macleans' oncampus blog)

Links:
BCCDC, Nerd Girl, Phillip Jeffrey, TEDxTt09

Filmed by Craig Ross at TEDx Terry talks 2009 (October 3rd, 2009). Video edited by David Ng.

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Arithmetic saves the day: Solar cells still an option.

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:44:06 -0500

Realclimate.org has a great post today called "An Open Letter to Steven Levitt." In case, you haven't heard, this is the economist, and one of the noted authors of the Freakonomics, who recently published Superfreakonomics, a book that is fast gaining notoriety as being fraught with many errors on the issue of Global Warming.

Essentially, the post does a great job in showing how some simple arithmetic could have easily demonstrated problems in one of the claims provided in the new book (on why utilizing Solar Energy would effectively be worse for Global Warming).

It's a wonderful piece, starting off as below, and definitely worth reading all the way through.

Dear Mr. Levitt,
The problem of global warming is so big that solving it will require creative thinking from many disciplines. Economists have much to contribute to this effort, particularly with regard to the question of how various means of putting a price on carbon emissions may alter human behavior. Some of the lines of thinking in your first book, Freakonomics, could well have had a bearing on this issue, if brought to bear on the carbon emissions problem. I have very much enjoyed and benefited from the growing collaborations between Geosciences and the Economics department here at the University of Chicago, and had hoped someday to have the pleasure of making your acquaintance. It is more in disappointment than anger that I am writing to you now.

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I've lost my brain (no seriously, I dropped it somewhere at the University of British Columbia). Can you help me find it?

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:35:18 -0500

(I'm guessing that at least one of my five readers are from UBC, so here goes).

Of course, this happens just before Halloween...

The other night, I moved a human anatomy torso model from my lab to my car. This was in preparation for an elementary school visit the following morning. It's basically this model shown here:

Anyway, the organs can be removed for closer examination, and essentially I dropped the brain somewhere in the transport. I'm even pretty sure where it likely fell (somewhere between the Michael Smith Labs which is next to the Bookstore, and the main parkade by the hospital, along East Mall).

Actually, here's a map of roughly where it was probably dropped:

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Master Skeleton Articulator: How cool would that be on a business card?

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:33:33 -0500

I've just had a piece published in the Walrus, and it's also available to read at their website. Basically, the piece is about how this 85ft Blue Whale skeleton was discovered and prepped for a new museum at the University of British Columbia.

It was really quite amazing to chat with Mike deRoos, the aforementioned Master Skeleton Articulator, and it's worth mentioning that he was not the one who came up with the job title. He was as humble and nice as humble and nice can be.

Anyway, whilst finding out stuff for the piece, I had a chance to take a few photos, which you can see below. It was awesome to see these bones, but it must be something else to see the whale itself in the wild.

Anyway, the article starts with a recipe:

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Art and Science: It's awkward sometimes.

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 08:30:00 -0500

Today, seedmagazine.com has a piece about Luke Jerram, the artist that I wrote about earlier (he of the incredible glass microbe structures). Anyway, I was asked to write something to go along with the piece, and have done so here.

It's funny, but I even felt a bit awkward writing this response (being asked to do a piece on Art and Science). I know I do this sort of thing in my lab, but having to comment intelligently about it feels weird to me.

Still, I do believe that precisely because "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," there's not one best way to talk science to the non-scientist, and I guess that's why I'm fond of all of those projects that do thrive upon (what some might call) unconventional partnerships.

Anyway what do you think?

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What Philip Graham Knows: An American in Portugal

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 14:00:00 -0500

Philip Graham is a writer and professor at the University of Illinois. Friend of the World's Fair Oronte Churm recently interviewed him. (Mr. Churm, aka John Griswold, also teaches at Illinois and is also a writer -- check out his beautiful new novel Democracy of Ghosts.) It's a good interview, right here at this link.

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How a conference managed to get over 250 attendees make Chewbacca sounds at once (plus a Chewbacca cognition poll)

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 13:16:20 -0500

Let me explain...

First take a peek at this:

I actually posted this earlier, but basically, what you're seeing here is the promotional video for a student conference, called TEDx Terry talks. This, we just finished up the other day (it was amazing and you can see the synopsis here).

Anyway, we actually launched the video way back in early September - the first day of school to be exact. We even had a booth and stuff where the video was playing, and had quite a few spritely 1st year university students walk by, look at it curiously, watch it, chuckle at it, etc. You'll note that Chewbacca makes a brief appearance in the video.

What was amazing to me was that during that day, not just one, but indeed, two, separate groups of 1st year students uttered something to the effect of:

"What is a Chewbacca?"

Seriously?

Is it possible that there are people in the world who do not "nod knowingly" when they see a picture of this iconic figure?

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The difference between how we see things when we're home and when we're away: an aloof problem of knowledge (Days at the Museum #4)

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 08:00:00 -0500

If you know where the Spy Museum is, I encourage you to read "Days at the Museum #4: International Week" over at McSweeney's. If you don't know where the Spy Museum is, well, help me help you find out.

Albert Bierstadt, Among the Sierra Nevada, California,1868 (from the Smithsonian website)

Some other things you may find in this column: Italian food in Chinatown; Japanese tourists; Albert Bierstadt in Rome and California; a French fellow; green denim on Germans; the serenity of a virtuous public space; and Obama's "Hope" poster.

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Can the West Save Africa? (then/1938 v. now/2005)

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 16:00:00 -0500

This chart about the lack of resolution to some basic problems in Africa -- between solutions proposed in 1938 to those from 2005 -- fascinates me not only for the info it presents but for the range of responses it has elicited. It is a chart from a working paper by William Easterly, a professor of economics at NYU.*

Here is the abridged version posted by Easterly at this blog:

(Click here for the full version from Easterly's paper.)

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Does Science Equal Progress?

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 08:00:00 -0500

Instead of me answering that, I wondered instead how other people have argued about the question. To be more specific, since I am interested in the role of scientific practice for defining the land, I wondered how people argued about whether or not science was better for agriculture. I wrote a book about it. It's called Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside. I commented here a few months ago that the book was finally on its way. Although Amazon sales do not begin until October 20th (here is their link), the publisher has it officially listed for sale now at their site.

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Chicken chicken chicken

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 11:58:08 -0500

Believe it or not, this is the second post at the World's Fair which just has the word "chicken" three times in the title. Anyway, this went viral a few years ago, but for some reason I find it really really funny. Plus, it's on my mind because it relates a little to an event I'm involved in coming up, which is all about presentation and speaking opportunities.

Here's the paper (front page shown and link to pdf here)

And here is the video:

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When "Brownian Motion" and "Bowel Movement" get mixed up...

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:57:10 -0500

... it's kind of funny.

Properties I Learned In Math Class On Brownian Motion (BM), with Explanations.

BY SCOTT LOWENSTEIN

- - - -

1. BMs come in two forms: "standard" and "multidimensional"

2. Law of large numbers: expected distance traveled during a BM = 0

3. Scaling: a scaled up BM is still a standard BM, it'll just take longer to get where you're going

4. Strong Markov property: the flow of BMs in the future are unaffected by BMs in the present after a stopping point has been reached

5. Law of iterated logs: duh

- - -

(From the ever entertaining McSweeneys.net)

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Celebrity culture versus, you know, actual important stuff (or #AIS)

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:35:07 -0500

Not specifically about science literacy, but more about just what inhabits a person's brain space at a given moment, and how that can lead to a sad degree of ignorance in world affairs.

I was mulling over this, when watching a television program called the "Long Way Down" about two motorcyclists (Ewan MacGregor and Charley Boorman) touring from the northern tip of Scotland to the southern tip of South Africa. It's a great show, where a lot of the focus of the programming was on their experiences in the African countries they rode through. There was one segment in particular that was really quite thought provoking, in that they visited a memorial site for the Rwandan Genocide and then asked their fixer (the Rwandan local guiding them through the country) to comment on what he thought about the lack of response from the international community. It was here, that the fellow brought up an issue of timing of when it occurred: things like the brutal killings happened the day after Kirk Cobain died, which greatly dampened the world's attention to the event.

I couldn't help thinking whether the kinetics of celebrity culture does this sort of thing often - as in undermine real important events to the point where there is possibly real effects.

Something similar happened more recently as well. Here, take a peek at this:

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