For a kitty that might be dead, he sure keeps busy.

photo via Cheezburger.com

According to an article in the NY Times by Eduardo Porter, the US insurance industry may also rate a 4. It accepts the scientific consensus position, but is reluctant to engage in political squabbles, because the threat of punitive regulation is a bigger risk than increased payouts due to worsening weather:

Yet when I asked Mr. Nutter what the American insurance industry was doing to combat global warming, his answer was surprising: nothing much…Instead, the focus of insurers’ advocacy efforts is zoning rules and disaster mitigation. – Eduardo Porter

Porter summarizes the position of a 4 on the Dubiosity Scale in his last sentence:

And that’s the best hope for those concerned about climate change: that global warming isn’t just devastating for society, but also bad for business. -Eduardo Porter

But, what happens when the issue is so politicized that the market forces are responding to the politics and not the market?

On the one hand, I am stunned by the bravery of this high-profile woman to not only undergo such a transformative surgery and then write about it in the nation’s newspaper of record less than three weeks later…On the other hand, I do worry that the ensuing publicity surrounding her announcement might evoke some magnitude of panic in women with breast cancer, particularly those who don’t have BRCA1/2 gene mutations or cannot afford to have the testing done…My primary concern is that some women with breast cancer may think that they are not being aggressive enough with their current treatment plan. – David Kroll

William Curtis School (Adolf Cluss, 1875), O Street, NW between 32 and 33rd Streets. Razed 1951. DCPS Archives

Those of you out there who went to graduate school, try to think back to the early days….I know the PTSD makes it difficult, but try to remember the beginning of graduate school. Do you remember the required classes that you had to take?  These classes were a mostly a hodge podge of random professors talking about either their own work, or a concept they may not even be familiar with. I read a Commentary in the journal Cell the other day that gives me hope that schools will consider modifying their graduate curriculum and spend more time on teaching.

The Commentary focuses on changes that are being made to the graduate curriculum at Harvard in their umbrella biological science program. One change they are making is offering short format skill building courses. These short courses can cover a technical skill, experimental design, presentation skills or quantitative methods. This is a great way to offer focused instruction on a particular concept and deliver it to those who are interested. While they are offering the new short form classes, they are also revising their long format core courses. The diverse departments are now focusing more on key concepts and skills and sacrificing the mechanistic details. They are even bringing “clickers” (a handheld device a student uses to answer professor’s questions anonymously in real-time) to graduate school, as many newly entering students have been using these all throughout undergrad (I am old, and have never used a clicker other than to change the channels on my grandma’s TV).

I’m particularly excited about a program they are enacting for post-docs called the Curriculum Fellows Program. These fellows interface with the instructors and graduate students helping to manage courses, develop curriculum, implement teaching technology, and evaluate new techniques. This would be a great opportunity for a post-doc interested in teaching and education research. While many PhDs get some teaching experience, this would be a way to really look at the science of learning and make a contribution in improving the program. I’m happy to see that schools are taking note that the times are changing and just slapping together some classes isn’t going to cut it any more.

The evidence does not support the trendy notion of “psychological debriefing” – one-off counseling immediately after events to help people “process” – in fact it shows that it is worse than doing nothing. The actual experts in disaster relief seem to be wise to the research and using methods to help identify those people who do need help, rather than “helping” people who do not need it.

*Hat tip to Ed Yong.

Plate CXXVIII. Roseburg Quadrangle, Oregon, Land Classification and Density of Standing Timber (Cartography Associates CC BY-NC-SA)

I love old maps. Many are wildly inaccurate. Many are fanciful. Many are surprisingly well done. In our era of Google Maps and GPS, it is easy to forget that early mapmakers could not easily see what they were drawing from above. The combination of skills, tricks, rules-of-thumb, and artistry that goes into cartography bends the mind.

David Rumsey has collected maps for decades and decided to donate his map collection to the Internet. Now, the internet has one more thing with which it can distract me.

*Hat tip to Rebecca Rosen.

Every movie villain worth his salt schemes to control the weather; now that experience is available to New York City museum-goers. The Museum Of Modern Art’s Rain Room, open from May 12 to July 28, is a “large-scale environment” which will allow visitors to “experience how it might feel to control the rain.”  The work, by design group Random International, consists of a structure that pours down water like rain, except when its sensors detect the presence of a human body.

MoMA says that the piece “also invites visitors to explore what role science, technology, and human ingenuity can play in stabilizing our environment.” Well maybe – although I doubt that creating blatantly fake environments which allow humans to “control nature” does much to advance our thinking about our real relationship with, say, weather and climate. Let’s just call it an undoubtedly cool piece of techno-art that will be a magnet for New Yorkers and tourists alike this summer.

Yet, I have been around Michele. I can testify that she applies the scientific thinking and knowledge to her everyday life. Is she a professional scientist? No. Neither am I, anymore. But, are we real scientists?

I think it was in this room, which was awesome:

Another part of the museum I vividly remember is the section about the arctic region.

This display was interactive: you could pop your own head through another hole in the ice, like a seal. I thought it was hilarious when I first saw it here, but this display actually exists in other museums and zoos as well.

Here’s an owl.

Hm. I actually have very little to say about my visit to this museum. It’s really nice, but I didn’t really see much there that I haven’t seen in other natural history museums.

However, I was there before or during a big renovation, so I probably didn’t see it all. A few years ago, the museum reopened, and also added a blue whale skeleton to the public exhibit, so it’s probably more exciting now.

It is not like all of us have been in space. We are a one planet species, with exactly a dozen individual exceptions. One day music videos from space may be passé. That day has not yet come.

We have some amazing technology and we use it for some amazing things, like researching treatments for disease and discovering new, sub-atomic particles. We also use it for sharing pictures of cats and recording music videos – IN SPACE! I believe that this is precisely why The Doctor loves humanity.

*Chris Hadfield is performing a revised version of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”.