Bears in Romania

Doug Saunders of The Globe and Mail has been writing dispatches from Romania. The article linked to in the title refers to the large population of black bears there. The black bear is more or less extinct in Europe—except in Romania where, according to Saunders, they’re something of a menace.

Please update your links!

Science Notes has moved to WordPress. The posts, comments, and tags are there. It may take a couple of dayme some time to create categories, especially since I'm travelling at the moment, and when that is done it will be easier to find articles. I'll be moving the blogroll as well.

So please change your links for Science Notes to http://sciencenotes.wordpress.com.

Adopt a cat!

My friend is giving up her two cats because she doesn't think she can take proper care of them when she comes out of the hospital.

They are two spayed females:

• Daisy is a brown tabby about four years old with beautiful green eyes.


• Nelly is a plush grey cat about two years old.

Both are healthy, friendly, and well-behaved. They are used to staying indoors. And they get along well together. Daisy, at least, is used to dogs; I'm not sure about Nelly.


If you are in the general area of Toronto, Ontario, and have a cat-shaped hole in your life, please get in touch.

New science blog in the mainstream media

While attending the 2008 Science Blogging conference in North Carolina, I met an energetic and charming medical journalist named Helen Chickering. She will be writing a brand new science blog for MS NBC news. Look for it under the name Six-pack Science. Tune in for the latest in practical science.

NC Museum of Life Sciences

Roy Campbell, the Director of Exhibits, took a group of science bloggers behind the scenes at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. and up front among the exhibits. This right whale is one of several whale skeletons mounted at the museum, suspended over another hall. The museum has a friendly and accessible air and gives off a sense of wonder.

Long necks

These fellows from the Toronto hydroelectric company are way up in a "cherrypicker" crane. They are attaching some cross-connections between power lines.

Below is a look at the new barosaurus at the Royal Ontario Museum.

Spreading the science around

In the Open Science session of the Science Blogging Conference, Bill Hooker pointed out that not everything needs to be online. In some countries, such as Thailand, people don't have Internet access but they do have DVD players. New contents of PLOS one could be burned onto DVDs and sent by mail.

Books: Now you can order Open Lab 2007

A great collection of blog articles about science has hit the virtual newsstands!

In a few weeks, look for it in a bookstores, Right now, you can order it through on-demand publisher Lulu, which gives the publishers (PLOS one) a greater share of the profits.

There was a wiral-bound pre-press version at the conference so that people could look over the assembled articles. It's quite substantial.

Definitely put ordering one on your to-do list. And sharpen your pencils to write one of the best science articles of 2008, for next year's edition.

Signing in

I'm signing in from the Science Blogging conference in North Carolina. One of the topics is providing open access to science via the Internet to the developing world.

Books for science bloggers

As my small contribution to the Science Blogging Conference, I'm donating four science books to be given to attending bloggers. They are

• Talk Talk Talk: Decoding the Mysteries of Speech by Jay Ingram


• If Life is a Game, These are the Rules by Cherie Carter-Scott


• Monkey Girl by Edward Humes


• Microcosmos by Brendan Broll

They all have BookCrossing IDs, so that their recipients can see them on the Monado bookshelf and track them on the BookCrossing web site.

All recipients are welcome to pass along any books that they are finished with.

Nuclear power woes are AECL's fault

The news has finally surfaced: AECL's poor practices caused the medical isotope "crisis" and other problems.

In the view of most nuclear experts and informed observers, these AECL failures are the real cause of last month's crisis in isotope production that culminated this week in the Harper government's unprecedented firing of Linda Keen, president of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission....

... top AECL management was repeatedly hauled on the carpet before the Nuclear Safety Commission and its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Control Board, to explain poor operating practices at the Universal reactor, including foot-dragging on implementing safety upgrades ordered by the federal regulator

...new reactors aren't operating because of a series of hard-to-believe blunders by once world-class Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., the Crown corporation responsible for designing and building them.

I credit Ontario Geofish with pointing out these basic facts months ago.

Which blogging software?

Among the free blogging sites, I recommend WordPress over Blogger.

Blogger gives you very simple capabilities: blog, post, tag, and archive posts and enable and manage comments. If you want something more complicated, you must go into your template and edit the code. There are no categories, so things tend to get chaotic. And if you customize your blog or change templates, all your improvements disappear.

Wordpress has more features that are useful for a larger blog. You don't have to use them until you need them but they are there. You can not only set tags but specify categories. You can set up a rotating blogroll instead of hand-coding it. There are simply a lot more options, which give you more flexibility.

Here's my test blog, created during a few minutes of the Blogging Skills session at the Science Blogging Conference.

Science Blogging Conference

After three years, I'm learning how to do it right!

Science Blogs have been such a success for Seed Magazine and others that they are changing the "news landscape" of the Web. Science bloggers are helping others to get started. For the next two days, I'm at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Sigma Xi facility in Research Triangle Park to learn new skills, topics, and approaches.

Driving to the science-blogging conference

I made it! After a late start and a long drive, LotStreetWiz and I arrived at Research Triangle Park at 02:45 this morning.

Saturday is a blogging skills session and a lab tour: for me, behind the scenes at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

Penny wise, pound foolish

That saying arose when a pound was a unit of money, a pound of sterling silver, in fact.

Study says that long waits for health care cost billions.

Conducted for the Canadian Medical Association by the Centre for Spatial Economics, the study measured the impact of the absence of both patients and their caregivers from the work force, as well as the increased costs of extra appointments, tests and medication required when patients languish in a queue.

When those factors were totalled, the authors concluded that it cost the economy $14.8-billion in 2007 to have patients wait longer than medically recommended for four procedures: joint replacements, cataract surgery, coronary bypasses and MRI scans. And that, in turn, cut federal and provincial revenues by $4.4-billion, the study says.

Only four procedures were examined in the study. Imagine what the total cost for all procedures might be!

Megachurch leader perjures himself over sexual coercion

Megachurch leader perjures himself over sexual coercion.

Georgia sex scandal:

An 80-year-old leader of a suburban megachurch who is at the center of a sex scandal has been charged with lying under oath for saying he had sex outside marriage with only one other woman, court documents show.....

Former church employee Mona Brewer is suing Paulk, his brother and the church on allegations that Paulk manipulated her into an affair from 1989 to 2003 by telling her it was her only path to salvation. In a 2006 deposition stemming from the lawsuit, the archbishop said under oath that the only woman he had ever had sex with outside of his marriage was Brewer.

But the results of a court-ordered paternity test revealed in October that Paulk is the biological father of his brother's son, D.E. Paulk, who is now head pastor at the church. As part of Brewer's lawsuit, eight women have given sworn depositions that they were coerced into sexual relationships with Earl Paulk.

Sir Edmund Hilary has died

Sir Edmund Hilary has died at age 88. He was the second man to scale Chomolungma, Goddess Mother of the World, known in English as Mount Everest. Chomolungma's resident goddess is Miyo Lungsangma, the mother goddess of earth.) The first man to scale the mountain was Tenzing Norgay, Sir Edmund's Sherpa guide.

Sir Edmund was 33 when he completed his famous climb. He devoted the rest of his life to helping the people of Nepal.

Steven Pinker on the moral instinct

Steven Pinker has an interesting article in the New York Times about "The Moral Instinct" He discusses moral dilemmas and victimless crimes. He compares Mother Teresa, Normal Borlaug, and Bill Gates. Who is the better person? Read it.

Oh noes! LOLtheists

I can has cheezburger is getting some competitionh from loltheist.com.



This one is "You just can't hide them."

Monorail cat: more passengers

moar funny pictures

I'm back on my diet.

Creationist book slips up

Steve at Forbidden Music writes,

"The book [Atlas of Creation by Harun Yahya] is juxtapositions of bad pictures of fossils with bad pictures of conordinal living things (fossil fern, living fern; fossil bunny, living bunny; fossil fly, living fly) alongside the erroneous claim that there are no differences between the extinct and extant forms...

Here’s his example of a living caddisfly.

It’s a fishing lure."

Follow the link to read more and see more and larger pictures.

Canada chastises Safety Commission for wanting safety

The Natural Resources Minister wants to fire the President of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission for not wanting to run a reactor without backup power. She says, "Just try it, buddy!"

The federal government has threatened to fire the head of Canada's nuclear watchdog over the Chalk River reactor shutdown, and she responded Tuesday by vowing to fight back through the courts.

Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn wrote a letter to Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) president Linda Keen on Dec. 27 in which he questions her judgment and informs her he is considering having her removed from the post.

The letter, which was leaked to the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, was written in the wake of last fall's shutdown of the Chalk River nuclear reactor and the global shortage of radioisotopes that resulted from it.

Keen responded on Tuesday with an eight-page letter accusing Lunn of improper interference and threatening to fight in court any attempt to remove her from her job.

Keen's letter... has been posted on the CNSC website along with Lunn's....

Additionally, Keen said she has asked the privacy commissioner and the RCMP to investigate how Lunn's letter was leaked to the media.

Lunn failed to notice that there have been production stoppages before without any "emergency" being publicized, because the isotope producers sell to each other when their plants have to go offline.

Toronto STC, January 8: Simplified Technical English

One of our goals as communicators is to write technical materials that people can understand. And one of the ways to do that is to simplify our language. Simplified Technical English is one such approach. The aim is to make material easier to read and easier to translate. On January 8, Barry Braster is telling the Toronto Society for Technical Communication about how to use Simplified Technical English. Here's the blurb:

Barry Braster, Tedopres International

In today's business, clear and consistent authoring has become a necessity: English has become the main language used in technical documentation throughout the world, but can be difficult to understand due to its many forms and complexity: complex sentence structures, multiple meanings and synonyms easily result in confusion. In addition, many readers' command of English can fall below the level of those who created the documentation (technical writers and engineers).

About Tedopres International

Tedopres has been offering professional technical documentation services since 1974. Tedopres specializes in all assets that come with technical documentation, including technical translation in over 40 languages, technical illustrations as well as software development to support the creation and management of technical documentation.

We meet in the Burgundy Room at the North York Memorial Hall, 5110 Yonge St., Toronto, at 7 p.m. General Admission is $5; STC Members attend for free.


UPDATE: Due to unforseen circumstances, the meeting could not be held. I think there will be a webcast instead.

Beijing pollution turns air to sludge

The Air Pollution Index in Beijing in late December was hitting 500 points, after which it's off the scale. That's air that hurts you to breathe, air you can cut with a knife or, perhaps, shovel. It's bad air for children, old people, or anyone working hard. It won't be good for Olympic athletes, either.

See "750 000 a year killed by Chinese pollution."

Major Andrew Olmsted killed in Iraq

A U.S. major who was also a blogger was killed by sniper fire in Iraq while he was trying to talk three insurgents into surrendering peacefully. His blog was From the Front Lines, for the Rocky Mountain News.

He left a final word on his personal blog, Andrew Olmsted, which he ran until February, 2007, when he was told it was in violation of his orders to express disagreement with orders no matter how willingly he carried them out.

He asked that his death not be used to further anyone's political purposes.

I do ask (not that I'm in a position to enforce this) that no one try to use my death to further their political purposes. I went to Iraq and did what I did for my reasons, not yours. My life isn't a chit to be used to bludgeon people to silence on either side. If you think the U.S. should stay in Iraq, don't drag me into it by claiming that somehow my death demands us staying in Iraq. If you think the U.S. ought to get out tomorrow, don't cite my name as an example of someone's life who was wasted by our mission in Iraq. I have my own opinions about what we should do about Iraq, but since I'm not around to expound on them I'd prefer others not try and use me as some kind of moral capital to support a position I probably didn't support. Further, this is tough enough on my family without their having to see my picture being used in some rally or my name being cited for some political purpose. You can fight political battles without hurting my family, and I'd prefer that you did so.

Major Olmsted was 38 years old.

Regardless of the merits of this war, or of any war, I think that many of us in America have forgotten that war means death and suffering in wholesale lots. A decision that for most of us in America was academic, whether or not to go to war in Iraq, had very real consequences for hundreds of thousands of people. Yet I was as guilty as anyone of minimizing those very real consequences in lieu of a cold discussion of theoretical merits of war and peace. Now I'm facing some very real consequences of that decision; who says life doesn't have a sense of humor?

People, bah, humbug!

Sometimes amputating people's hands seems like a good idea.

Four teenagers in Camrose, Alberta, broke into someone's house over the Christmas holidays and cooked their cat alive in a microwave oven. The idea of someone doing that to a helpless and trusting animal has aroused considerable outrage.

It's tempting to suggest, "Pick on somebody your own size."

Squid snacks

On a walk through Toronto's downtown Chinatown just before Christmas, I noticed some flat, paper-thin, dried squids in front of a Chinese grocery. The proprietor explained, with words and gestures, that the squids are slathered with barbecue sauce and cooked on both sides. You can see the squids piled high on this counter, in bundles, with their tentacles tangled at one end.



Speaking of sustainable fisheries, the three bins at the lower right are full of tiny dried fishes. Perhaps they are used for soup? Then never grow up to be big fish. By any rules I've ever heard of, they'd be undersized.

Completed tech pubs judging

About twenty-five people got together at Front Runner Publishing Solutions to judge thirty paper entries and six online entries for the Toronto STC 2007 technical publications contest. My partner and I judged three anonymous examples of online help in the online portion of the contest. They were good, average, and excellent. For each one we worked independently through a four-page evaluation sheet with detailed questions about the structure, content, writing, and other aspects of the set of help files (focus, indexing, search capability, navigation clues, use of graphics, etc.) Then we discussed our distances and rationalized them. On the whole, our judgements were similar although each of us had "hot buttons" where we were more demanding of high quality. The products were quite different.

The competition manager will take our results, see which entries get awards, and re-unite the entries with the names of their authors.

For my part, I had the leisure to examine what makes a good system and see examples of good or bad help systems. I talked with my friends and colleagues and enjoyed our mid-day lunch at a local restaurant. It's an investment of time but it had its rewards. Fhe contestants get a detailed analysis of their work with constructive criticism; good entries are recognized and that's echoed back to employers; and the reputation of Toronto STC as an active chapter is secured. And it continues a tradition: we had the first or second online publications competition in North America, and we're still continuing it. The competition manager gets leadership experience. Truly, a good time is had by all.

STC Toronto tech pubs contest

Today's the day that a group of technical communicators and managers get together and judge all the entries in this year's STC Toronto technical publication contest. It's an all-day task but by this evening, harmonized results should be popping from our spreadsheets.

Each entry is anonymized and judged by three judges independently on a whole list of factors that depend on the publication type. It wouldn't be fair to judge marketing materials and annual reports and training materials and reference manuals by the same standards. Then the judging team meets and discusses their results. If there are wide differences in the scores for each factor, the judges discuss the evaluation and bring the scores within shouting distance of each other. Then the results are tabulated.

Today we estimate that each judging team will judge three or four publications. It will probably take an hour or two for each one.

And what's in it for me? Aside from the free pizza and company of my colleagues, I get to see what's new in the best examples the entrants could produce. The top level winners are sent to the international contest, which uses a modified version of the criteria developed in Toronto by Roy Hartshorn. Toronto has done very well in the past. We've even occasionally bagged "Best of Show."

How important is staff training?

You know that's a trick question, right? The answer is consistent: training of staff in the workplace is vital.


A year ago today, the inflatable roof at BC Place Stadium in Vancouver collapsed under the weight of slush and meltwater. A report concludes that BC Place Stadium collapse could have been avoided if staff were properly trained.

existing damage to the roof fabric, human error and weather caused the tear in the roof panel. [The report] also found staff did not properly monitor the "cascading effect of water slush," and did not realize what was happening until it was too late. Even then, the report found, the operators were not trained in dealing with ponded water on the roof and did not know how to deal with it.

Quoting Mark Twain: Our inalienable rights

Mark Twain once said:

It is by the goodness of God that in our coutry we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practise either of them.

See also:
- Mark Twain on writing crisply

Baby Name Voyager

This should appeal to teenagers! It has a large graphic component and easy interaction.

In February 2005, IBM researcher Martin Wattenberg created a Web-based visualization applet, the NameVoyager, to help call attention to his wife's first book, The Baby Name Wizard, a guide to American baby names. This effort to support his wife's project swept the Web and became a hot topic of conversation - for those searching for the perfect baby name and for others. Without any advertising, the applet drew more than 500,000 site visits in its first two weeks. It has been downloaded more than 900,000 times as of mid-April. Also in April, Google found more than 11,000 references to the NameVoyager.

It follows usability principles:

The NameVoyager follows Ben Shneiderman's mantra, "Overview first, zoom and filter, details on demand." When the applet starts, the viewer sees a set of horizontal layers representing all names in the database. It shows both sexes: red for girls and blue for boys. More popular names have a darker colour.

It's interactive: it reacts to every keystroke:

To filter the data, you can select Boys, Girls, or Both. If you type letters, the applet takes them as the beginning of a name; the applet will then show only names starting with those letters.

It may even help to predict future popularity.

Hell and damnation!

Local, that is, Toronto-area imams apparently will not pray for Benazir Bhutto because she wasn't radical enough.

By Tarek Fatah and Salma Siddiqui, National Post

Ms. Bhutto had not yet received a proper burial before the attacks on her character started appearing. The vice-president of the Canadian Arab Federation circulated an article lambasting Ms. Bhutto, mocking her as stooge of the West. It did not end at that level. Haroon Siddiqui of the Toronto Star dedicated an entire column to attacking Ms. Bhutto's legacy and labelling her as corrupt and, God forbid the thought, pro-West. As if her being pro-Western was somehow anti-Canadian.

If attempts by Islamic writers to disparage Benazir Bhutto were distasteful, the conspicuous silence of Canada's Islamic organizations was equally disturbing....

At one Mississauga mosque where supporters of Ms. Bhutto had requested a prayer for their departed leader, the imam refused to utter her name from the pulpit. A few kilometres away in one of Canada's largest mosques run by the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), Skeikh Ala ElSayed refused to utter the words "Benazir Bhutto" from the pulpit, as if it was a profanity....

In another twist, the mosque hosting the prayer event to commemorate Benazir Bhutto missed the point altogether. Instead of honouring the women who came to attend the prayer event as a mark of respect for Benazir Bhutto, they were told they would not be permitted to enter the prayer area from the main entrance. All women were asked to take the rear staircase.

Brits against ID cards

This might be quite stale, but the campaign against national ID cards in the United Kingdom has an irresistible illustration.

Books read in the last year

The list of books that I read in 2007 is up at my personal blog.

Happy New Year!

A huge crowd of people gathered in Toronto's town square to celebrate the beginning of New Year's Day in the middle of the night. Happy arbitrary calendar boundary!


The image is from Wikipedia:

The Flammarion woodcut is an enigmatic wood engraving by an unknown artist that first appeared in Camille Flammarion's L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire (1888), a work on meteorology for a general audience. The image depicts a man peering through the Earth's atmosphere as if it were a curtain to look at the inner [outer?] workings of the universe. The caption translates to "A medieval missionary tells that he has found the point where heaven and Earth meet..."