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Recent Major Posts
- Pratt Institute holds 124th Commencement, special gallery show
- Rhett Bradbury’s Master’s Thesis explores how gaming can foster political leadership
- Envirolutions asks the Pratt community to identify where there is “room for improvement”
- My review of Railsback and Grimm’s “Agent-based and individual-based modeling” textbook published in Ecology
- Envirolutions club launches its “Room for Improvement” campaign
- Dumb radio ads provide smart insight into the diverse nature of human societies
- Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
- Pratt Envirolutions Students Bring Recycling Bins to Campus
- Concept mapping as a creative tool
- Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
Recent Minor Posts
- Pratt Professor Ágnes Mócsy releases “Smashing Matters” short film
- NPR piece suggests that economics are pushing us towards nutrient recycling
- Just in case you missed it the first ten times: E.O. Wilson likes group selection, Jerry Coyne does not
- Allen MacNeill predicts resolution of Ev-Coop debates
- Martin Nowak to lecture on the compatibility of god and the evolutionary process
- Understanding kin selection and reciprocity when strategies are culturally propagated
- “Earth Hour” seeks to re-focus our attention on all the earth provides
- Seth Horowitz on our perception of sound
- Forward on Climate Rally seeks to shift the national dialogue on anthropogenic climate change
- Quantifying the climate value of that 40-acre woodlot
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What I am reading now
Category Archives: Reviews
Pratt Professor Ágnes Mócsy releases “Smashing Matters” short film
A colleague of mine, Associate Professor Ágnes Mócsy, just released her first short film, smashing matters: Featuring a really broad array of eminent physics researchers, this film uses the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider as a case study for how funding basic science … Continue reading
NPR piece suggests that economics are pushing us towards nutrient recycling
NPR All Things Considered “Cities Turn Sewage Into ‘Black Gold’ For Local Farms” This is a really interesting piece because it suggests that the costs associated with properly disposing of human waste are beginning to incentivize municipalities to repurpose this … Continue reading
My review of Railsback and Grimm’s “Agent-based and individual-based modeling” textbook published in Ecology
I am excited by the recent publication of my review of Agent-based and individual-based modeling: a practical introduction in the January issue of Ecology. The review, entitled “Individual-based modeling for the masses“, lauds this valuable textbook designed to support individual-based … Continue reading
Dumb radio ads provide smart insight into the diverse nature of human societies
Do everyday people have any sense of their place in the world? Human beings live in incredibly complex societies undergirded by convoluted economies and overwhelmingly diverse cultures. Do we have a sense of how these societies came to be, or … Continue reading
Seth Horowitz on our perception of sound
WNYC The Leonard Lopate Show “ Please Explain: Hearing and Sound” Interesting that Horowitz discusses the same rationale for why the cell phone conversations of others are so much more annoying than other conversations, a topic I have discussed here.
Posted in A Minor Post, Music, Radio & Podcasts, Sound Perception
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Quantifying the climate value of that 40-acre woodlot
The New York Times “Tree Power“
Up-Goer Five text editor challenges you to make accessible explanations
Scientific American blogs “Science in Ten-Hundred Words: The “Up-Goer 5″ Challenge” THE UP-GOER FIVE TEXT EDITOR Oh, and by the way the title of this post would not pass the up-goer five test! Thanks to one of my Pratt students, … Continue reading
Posted in A Minor Post, Pratt Institute, Public Outreach, Teaching, Web
Tagged Tony Wylen
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Green port policies yield big decreases in the ecological footprint of shipping
National Geographic “California Ports Go Green” This is a nice infographic showing that changes in policy can have a big impact on the sustainability of commerce. It is amazing how much efficiency improvements can lower ecological impacts.
As the nature of university-level teaching changes, should we re-assess the credit hour?
The Chronicle of Higher Education “The Curious Birth and Harmful Legacy of the Credit Hour” The Chronicle of Higher Education “In Defense of the Credit Hour“
Posted in A Minor Post, Articles, Higher Education
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Dog license dataset opens up huge potential for understanding the dog-human mutualism
WNYC “NYC’s Top Dogs: Mapping Names & Breeds in the City” WNYC “Dogs of NYC” Data sets like these, even flawed by their incompleteness (only 20% of dogs in New York City are registered) are fascinating. The human relationship with dogs has … Continue reading
Brief NYT article on empathy in children
The New York Times “Understanding How Children Develop Empathy“
Posted in A Minor Post, Altruism, Articles, Empathy
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Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
In a recent short opinion piece (Scientific American “Creation, Evolution and Indisputable Facts“), Jacob Tanenbaum argues that selectively rejecting evolutionary biology is dangerous to the scientific culture of America. He rightly points out that our populace does not reject science … Continue reading
Production on marginal lands can meet only 25% of our biofuel mandates
Nature “Bioenergy: Biofuel production on the margins” & “Sustainable bioenergy production from marginal lands in the US Midwest” This is fascinating, and provides further evidence that even the smartest biofuel production methods are not going to be enough to mitigate our … Continue reading
Roberts Publishing releases an iPad version of their majors Evolution textbook
iTunes “Evolution: Making Sense of Life” I don’t own an iPad so I won’t be playing with this anytime soon, but I am very curious about the impact of this first-of-its-kind majors Evolution textbook for tablet. I am not sure … Continue reading
Montreal art installation rewards cooperative play with musical novelty
I really appreciate the combination of social play and music that went into this very simple but very rich piece of public art.
Posted in A Minor Post, Art & Design, Cooperation, Installation Art, Play, Public Art, Web
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If your “free will” is questionable, feel free to exercise your “free won’t”
Scientific American “Free Won’t“
Posted in A Minor Post, Articles, Behavior, Consciousness, Emotion, Neuroscience
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Do our brains require endurance activity in order to function?
The New York Times “Exercise and the Ever-Smarter Human Brain” While I think that the finding that brain size and capacity for endurance are linked is interesting and important, I am a bit baffled by this article’s take on the … Continue reading
Multiple Intelligences theory gets some neuroscientific support
Neuron “Fractionating Human Intelligence” What is crazy about these findings is that they are novel. Is this really the first time that anyone decided to tackle the question of what different “intelligence tests” measure? The first time that anyone has … Continue reading
Charlotte Douglas International Airport employs worms to close the loop on airport waste
NPR All Things Considered “One Airport’s Trash Is 2 Million Worms’ Treasure“
