Rowland Institute Library Blog

It was standing room only at Lowell Hall yesterday evening and a line of would-be attendees (myself included) went around the block. Did anyone hear Dawkins’s talk yesterday? Luckily a Crimson writer got in and summarized it, saying that Dawkins refers to religion as a “virus,” not a function of evolution and “devise” and socially “costly.” It would be interesting to know his views on specific religions; I wonder if he treats them too generally, or if he ever read anything like James’s “The Varieties of Religious Experience” or Ian Barbour’s “Religion and Science,” not that these would change his mind, just broaden it, perhaps. The second lecture is today at 5, same place.

New Scientist posts an article about a report from the US-Canada Power System Outage Task Force which states that many utilities did not keep up with the standards of the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC); if they had, the largest power outage in U.S. history might have been avoided, says the task force.

Address real people and real issues and think of questions ahead of time, this article in Today’s Engineer urges (Source: WHAT’S NEW @ IEEE IN COMPUTING)

A Nature news article examines the appearance of increasing competitiveness in the life sciences, a push to get results out as fast as possible in pursuit of grants, tenure, prestige and other aims. A story is told of a couple that presented a poster and published their results, just barely ahead of four other groups that learned of their techniques through their conference presentation. Are carelessness and sloppy research on the increase as a result, or are there just isolated phenomena. (Karel Svoboda, formerly of Howard Berg’s lab at Rowland/Harvard, is among those quoted)

A Guardian article lists ten hoaxes and forgeries, some better known and more recent such as Jan Henrik Schön’s fabricated results and element 118.
(Source: SciTechDaily, http://SciTechDaily.com)

I’ve moved the library weblog over to Harvard Law and am having a go with their Manila software. Read earlier postings at http://rihlib.blogspot.com, where I will continue to archive them …

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