Encephalon #64

The latest issue of Encephalon (a neuroscience and psychology blog carnival) is out at Neurocritic, and it's really a very fine piece of work. Check it out.

Baked on Brains: Encephalon number 62

The latest Encephalon Carnival is out at the Mouse Trap. Sandy G has done a fine job, and whether you snort it, smoke it, shoot it up, or spoon it right onto the cortex, you should head on over.

Other Encephalon related news is that there is now a dedicated feed.

The next edition of this carnival comes out on February 2nd and is hosted by Shelley Batts at Of Two Minds. The carnival archive and schedule is here.

Blogging for Darwin

There's a blog swarm a'commin', and it is taking place from February 12th-15th of this year (2009), to mark the bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth, which was February 12th, 1809.

Effortless Incitement will be participating. I'm not sure what I'll be doing yet, but I'll search the pile of stuff I'm planning on blogging for suitably Darwin celebratory hooks. To find out more about the swarm, click the image.

Praxis number 6 is out!

Hooray! There's another edition of Praxis, over at PodBlack Cat. A cool carnival, at a cool blog, and one of my posts made the cut.

The next edition will be hosted at Mudphudder, and it should hit the pipes on February 15th.

The video below is irrelevant. But it came up high on a Google of 'praxis', and I rather like it. And I'm going to stick with regularly including images or videos that result from this semi-random procedure for a while, just to see what happens. It did give us the stainless steel rat brain slicer image for the post on the digrizfiz, after all.

Carnival of the Africans #5

This is a somewhat belated notice, but Carnival of the Africans number 5 is out, over at 01 and the Universe. It's worth checking out, and our glorious leader Michael Meadon over at Ionian Enchantment is to be praised for getting an African naturalistic/sceptical Blog Carnival going.

The next edition will be hosted by The Sceptic Detective.

Praxis number 5

Welcome to the 5th issue of the Praxis carnival – the carnival that’s about the work of science. I got a bunch of interesting contributions, and thank all who took the trouble. The next issue will be hosted by PodBlack Cat on the 15th of January 2009.

BY THE WAY: I was doing nicely working on hosting this carnival, until over 90% of the submissions arrived with only one day, and that a weekend when I was traveling and being a full-time dad, before the publication deadline.* Some did not really get a proper look over, and this is a shorter than usual edition of Praxis. I'm going to pass everything in the pile that didn't get a fair look in time to PodBlack Cat who is hosting the next edition. And maybe Blog Carnivals should be like many other kinds of events - the deadline for submission being some definite time that is more than a nanosecond before publication?

A couple of general topics came up more than once, and I’ll chat about those first, then finish with the strays and orphans where only one contribution was on a specific topic.

First up, the important matter of the representation of women in science. This includes simple numerical representation, but also the self-presentation of women, and what others think and say about it, and what that makes female scientists think about themselves. One of the postings is at On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess by Dr Isis, and the other by Dr Free-Ride at Adventures in Ethics and Science.

Really, the fact that these discussions take place at all shows that there is still a problem. Men seem only discuss what being a scientist does to their image of themselves as men to make jokes – at least if they survive high school. But blogs are a great way to have some of the discussion we need to have about this. (Still on gender, although not representation in the same sense, Drug Monkey has a thoughtful piece on the tendency towards male-based research.)

Then there are a couple of pieces about seminars. First a good piece by Dr Isis about the importance of going to seminars, including ones that aren’t in ‘your’ area. Then there’s one in Uncertain Principles about the problem of scheduling seminars, and a poll at FemaleScienceProfessor on the same topic. As most of us know, there's a lot of anecdotal evidence and strongly held opinion about these scheduling questions. It would be nice to see some actual science (y'know, with measurements and stuff) on this topic.

Turning to the strays and orphans there’s a fine piece about Open Access (OA) written in the form of a letter from the future by someone battling with the costs imposed by rent-seeking copyright hogs at The Quantum Pontiff. There are various arguments for OA, but I think the best one is the one directed at the self-interest of the publishing scientist, who only loses by limiting access. And this is a lively and original presentation of that argument.

The Skeptical OB writes on the costs of politicians embracing alternative medicine (Booo!) in the case of former SA president Mbeki’s AIDS denialism. This piece reports on the important recent PNAS paper attempting to quantify the human cost of the denialism and foot-dragging over the causes of AIDS, and prescribing antiretrovirals. (They reckon around a third of a million lives, 35 thousand infants born infected...)

Michael Nielsen has a lively discussion of the '10,000 hour rule', as pushed into popular discussion by Malcolm Gladwell's new book "Outliers". There's good evidence that 10,000 hours of 'deliberate practice' is what it takes to get to be top at anything, and Nielsen asks what this might mean in the case of science.

Another piece on MudPhudder deals with the problem of choosing a research project. (There’s a related post on choosing a topic.) Both are important questions for the fledgling scientist.

Gobbledygook has a selective and diverting digest of the results of a survey of over 30 blog posts responding to 10 questions about science blogging. There are also links to the 30+ original posts.

Finally a fairly narrative piece at PodBlack, where the next issue of this carnival will be hosted, partly about dealing with pseudoscience, but also about the challenges of surviving research trips.

Actually no, that's not final. There's also the announcement relating the latest round of the Open Laboratory, at A Blog Around the Clock. The announcement is that the deadline has been reached, the review process is underway, but you can get links to earlier editions of this initiative, and look at the submissions.

So that's the latest Praxis. Please report link bugs and other mishaps - I'll fix them as fast as I can.

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* And I made the error of letting text intended to end up as html anywhere near Microsoft Word, and ended up with a mess and a foul temper. When, oh when, will I learn?

Praxis

I'm hosting the next issue (number 5) of the Praxis carnival here. The issue comes out on 15 December.

Here are the guidelines for the carnival.
Here is the hosting schedule.

Carnival of the Africans #4

So, as I mentioned a little while ago, I'll be hosting the next Carnival of the Africans here at Effortless Incitement. Send submissions, within a day or so, since the carnival takes place on Friday, to doctor.spurt@gmail.com

As the guidelines for the Carnival say:c

The aim is to showcase the best blog posts on science, academia, and scientific skepticism by Africans or on Africa.

Carnival of the Africans #4

So, I'll be hosting the next Carnival of the Africans here at Effortless Incitement. The guidelines don't indicate that there's a dedicated email address for submissions to the Carnival, but I'll apply the sharp pointy end of my foot to the soft fleshy end of Meadon and see if I can find out more. Bottom line about the Carnival is:

The aim is to showcase the best blog posts on science, academia, and scientific skepticism by Africans or on Africa.

Encephalon #53

Encephalon number 53 is out, over at Ionian Enchantment, where Michael Meadon is in the midst of some kind of hosting frenzy. Among the highlights are a very good (and very very long) piece on Wilder Penfield at Neurophilosophy, and something on the widely reported recent Nature Neuroscience study on predictions of hits or misses in basketball from short video clips of the beginnings of shots, at Neuronism. Two of my recent articles about chimps also made the cut, one on self-distraction, and one on consolation.

Carnival of the Africans #1 is out...

So, the somewhat oddly named Carnival of the Africans (which is a carnival, and is African, it's just also sceptical and naturalistic, which you can't tell from the title, which could just as well go for a festival of anti-naturalist woo-lovers) is out. Cheers to Michael Meadon for the initiative, and let's hope it's a success. Among other things there's an article by leading SA sceptic George Claassen on Angus Buchan which includes preliminary results of a national survey on religious and other supernatural beliefs, and Owen Swart's (unsuccessful) "homeopathic suicide attempt" in a series of video clips. Wim Louw has an article on basic tools of the sceptic over at his blog too.

Praxis #1 is out!

I mentioned a little while ago that a new carnival was starting, called Praxis, and about the work of science. Well, number 1 is out, at A Blog Around the Clock. Check it out - there's a lot of articles in it, and I won't try to pick one or two highlights here. In fact I've hardly scratched the surface myself.

The next edition will be on September 15 at Life 3.0.

Encephalon #52

Encephalon number 52 is just out, in a Q&A format, over at Ouroboros.
There's plenty of good stuff in the roundup, including a useful piece on
grandmother neurons over at combing cognits, and something on the neural
basis of social attachments at Neurotic Physiology. The next issue of the
carnival will be hosted by Michael Meadon at Ionian Enchantment.

Brains ... brains ... brains ...

SA Science and Scepticism Carnival

So Michael Meadon over at Ionian Enchantment was, according to my mate Dave, all long-faced today over the fact that a day or two had passed after his rallying call about pro-science and woo-smiting bloggers in (or from, or in other unspecified ways connected to) South Africa, and I still hadn't waxed joyful over it here at Effortless Incitement.

(At the time Dave neglected to point out that this was a very good illustration of Effortless Incitement - in this case vexing by inactivity. Failure to do anything at all is, of course, not the only way of achieving effortlessness, as Jeff Lint fans are well aware.)

Anyway, the initiative is a welcome one. The ANC figured to leave evolution out of school biology for more than the first ten years of democracy. (Thereby simply keeping the biology part of the travesty of a school science curriculum left by the ideological whack-job architects of Apartheid.) Leaving that aside, levels of basic comprehension of science are low, and levels of credulity for spooky, magical, and other 'super'-natural things depressingly high. (See the second half of this post for a preview of a recent study on the topic.)

Michael wants to get up a carnival of SA sceptics and woo-smiters, and (a) is looking to find participants and hosts and stuff, and (b) desperately needs help improving on the rather clunky name proposal that's on the table now ("South African Science & Scepticism Circle").

I hereby suggest (since my first proposal went down like a streaker at Easter Mass at the Vatican) the following:

Southern Exposure. (Regrettably also the name of a group in NZ dedicated to exploring "Polyamory, Intimate Communications, BDSM, Alternative Lifestyles and more...")
[The] Sceptics of the South.
[The] Southern Fried Sceptics.
Doobeedoobeedubitable.

And, finally for now:

The Azanian Rational and Scientific Expeditionary force (Or the A.R.S.E. Carnival for short) .

Also, I'll be hosting the thing, whatever it's called, in late November.

Encephalon #51

Sandy G hosts the latest Encephalon, over at The Mouse Trap. It's cool. Among the fine things there is an article at Mind Hacks about how just calling a deck of cards special fools even accomplished tricksters into entertaining crazy hypotheses about the tricks done with it, reminding us of something Dennett has said about the non-existence of a genuine 'hard problem' of consciousness. There's also a piece at Mind, Body, Soul on Asperger's syndrome patients and their deficits at reading others. That latter piece is fruitfully read alongside one at Neurocritic on differences between autistics and Williams' sydrome subjects found with eye tracking. My own piece from a little while ago on encoding of the concept 'nest' in the mouse hippocampus also made the cut. There's more - check it out.

Praxis: New carnival

Lay Science has launched what should be a cool new blog carnival, called Praxis. Here's what it says on the box:

Topics:
The carnival is intended to cover all aspects of life as an academic, whether it's the lifestyle, career progress, doing a Ph.D., getting funding, climbing the slippery pole, academic life as a minority, working with colleagues and students, dealing with the peer-review process, publishing, grants, science 2.0, amusing anecdotes, conference experiences, philosophical musings, public engagement, or even historical articles about what life was like in the good (or bad) old days.

I'll link to this when it comes out, and maybe even contribute from time to time.

The 92nd Skeptics' Circle

Hey hey! The 92nd Skeptic's Circle blog carnival is just out, at The Lay Scientist. Among the highlights, is Bing McGhandi's account of his pseudo-legal menacing at the hands of someone representing a Feng Shui 'expert' he subjected to a well-deserved drubbing some time ago. The good citizens at Autism Street also report on a similarly well-deserved spanking handed to someone peddling nonsense regarding vaccines and autism. Greta Christina who has written about atheism and porn and more has a typically good article on why she doesn't believe in souls. Far be it from me to call it a highlight, but I'm pleased that my report on my mate Dave's correspondence with Roger Coghill over his inducement to commit infanticide made the cut.

I love the smell of arguments in the morning...

Encephalon #50

Hey hey - the latest Encephalon, number 50, is just out at SharpBrains. There's much of interest, and it's also the first blog carnival featuring postings from this blog. There's an archive of older issues of Encephalon over at WordPress, and of more recent ones at Sharp Brains here. I've not looked through the whole thing yet, but one high point so far is Jack at Pure Pedantry on I want it now - temporal discounting and the primate brain.

(PS: I've not been posting much. I got some vile malware on my latop, which is where I do most of my blogging and writing, and not managed to kill it off yet. Normal service will be resumed asap.)