That Yossarian

An awkward collision of science and pop culture.
capitalnewyork: Recommended reading: President Obama and Mitt Romney’s common enemy | via Politico “Campaigns just feel overwhelmed with the volume and increased competition among the players to ‘make’ news, which generally means creating some element of conflict,” McKinnon said. “It’s an interesting development that presidential campaigns have ceased coddling the press. Or even trying to manage the press. They seem to have concluded they can’t win no matter what they do, so why try. And so they now often seem to adopt a hostile attitude toward the press generally.”

capitalnewyork:

Recommended reading: President Obama and Mitt Romney’s common enemy | via Politico

“Campaigns just feel overwhelmed with the volume and increased competition among the players to ‘make’ news, which generally means creating some element of conflict,” McKinnon said.

“It’s an interesting development that presidential campaigns have ceased coddling the press. Or even trying to manage the press. They seem to have concluded they can’t win no matter what they do, so why try. And so they now often seem to adopt a hostile attitude toward the press generally.”

darrylayo: Hulk. By Gabriel Hardman and Jeff Parker. Jeff is a good guy and has the quality that I like in a writer: humor. He also writes bad guys really well. He writes two of the best bad guy comics for Marvel: Hulk and Thunderbolts. Fun fact: Hulk’s name is also “Thunderbolt.” Anywho, Parker also did a webcomic with Erika Moen called “Bucko,” which is singularly the reason I started calling everybody and their mother “bucky.” -Ayo

darrylayo:

Hulk. By Gabriel Hardman and Jeff Parker.

Jeff is a good guy and has the quality that I like in a writer: humor. He also writes bad guys really well. He writes two of the best bad guy comics for Marvel: Hulk and Thunderbolts.

Fun fact: Hulk’s name is also “Thunderbolt.”

Anywho, Parker also did a webcomic with Erika Moen called “Bucko,” which is singularly the reason I started calling everybody and their mother “bucky.”

-Ayo

cnet: This is the chief uncertainty regarding the future potential for social networks to remain profitable. The  model of using targeted advertising to drive revenue on a CPC or CPM basis is still relatively new. Although Facebook is likely to be around for many years because of its usefulness as a social network, it remains to be seen whether advertisers will continue to trust that medium as a method for gaining customers.  GM to yank $10M in Facebook ads, saying they don’t work The automaker began re-evaluating its Facebook strategy earlier this year. According to the WSJ, it determined that while free marketing works on the site, paid ads don’t. Read more

cnet:

This is the chief uncertainty regarding the future potential for social networks to remain profitable. The  model of using targeted advertising to drive revenue on a CPC or CPM basis is still relatively new. Although Facebook is likely to be around for many years because of its usefulness as a social network, it remains to be seen whether advertisers will continue to trust that medium as a method for gaining customers. 

GM to yank $10M in Facebook ads, saying they don’t work

The automaker began re-evaluating its Facebook strategy earlier this year. According to the WSJ, it determined that while free marketing works on the site, paid ads don’t.

Read more

House passes bill to bar spending on political science research

world-shaker:

Rep. Jeff Flake tried and failed this week to get his colleagues in the House of Representatives to slash the budget of the National Science Foundation, proposing an amendment to a 2013 spending bill that would have cut more than $1 billion from the agency’s funds.

But unable to convince his fellow House members that the government needs less research on physics, engineering and other fields, he chose a lower-hanging target: social science studies with easy-to-ridicule titles.

And this time, he was persuasive.

By a vote of 218-208, the House Wednesday night backed an amendment that would bar the NSF from spending any of its 2013 funds on its political science program, which allocated about $11 million in peer-reviewed grants this year. Explaining the amendment on the House floor Wednesday evening, Flake said that given his colleagues’ reluctance to slash the agency’s overall budget — the House defeated his earlier amendment by a vote of 291 to 121 — Congress should ensure, “at the least, that the NSF does not waste taxpayer dollars on a meritless program.”

Some of those “meritless” programs?

But in a particularly troubling sign for political scientists and advocates for academic research (including several scholars posting about the bill at the Monkey Cage), several of the projects that Flake singled out for ridicule (“These studies might satisfy the curiosities of a few academics, but I seriously doubt society will benefit from them”) touch on issues such as whether policy makers do what citizens want, and why young people don’t seem interested in going into politics.

sciencenote: Bruce Beutler : was born on December 29, 1957 in Chicago and recieved his M.D. from the University of Chicago in 1981. After graduation he worked as a scientist at Rockefeller University in New York, at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, where he discovered the LPS receptor. Then he moved to Scripps Research Institute where he was a Professor and Chairman, Department of Genetics at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA, USA. Recently, he rejoined the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas as the Director of the Center for the Genetics of Host Defense.His father, Ernest Beutler, a hematologist and medical geneticist, was also a Professor and Department Chairman at Scripps.Beutler was the first to isolate mouse tumor necrosis factor-alpha and to demonstrate the inflammatory potential of this cytokine, proving its important role in endotoxin-induced shock. Interested in the mechanism by which LPS activates mammalian immune cells, Beutler used TNF production as a phenotypic endpoint to identify the LPS receptor. Identification of the receptor hinged on the positional cloning of the mammalian Lps locus, which had been known since the 1960s as a key genetic determinant of all biological responses to LPS. Beutler thus discovered the key sensors of microbial infection in mammals, demonstrating that one of the mammalian Toll-like receptors, TLR4, acts as the membrane-spanning component of the mammalian LPS receptor complex. The research on TLRs won him the Nobel Prize in 2011. In the course of their work, Beutler and his colleagues identified genes required for other important biological processes, including the regulation of iron absorption,hearing, and embryonic development, since their disruption by ENU created strikingly abnormal visible phenotypes.

sciencenote:

Bruce Beutler :

was born on December 29, 1957 in Chicago and recieved his M.D. from the University of Chicago in 1981. After graduation he worked as a scientist at Rockefeller University in New York, at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, where he discovered the LPS receptor. Then he moved to Scripps Research Institute where he was a Professor and Chairman, Department of Genetics at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA, USA. Recently, he rejoined the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas as the Director of the Center for the Genetics of Host Defense.His father, Ernest Beutler, a hematologist and medical geneticist, was also a Professor and Department Chairman at Scripps.Beutler was the first to isolate mouse tumor necrosis factor-alpha and to demonstrate the inflammatory potential of this cytokine, proving its important role in endotoxin-induced shock. Interested in the mechanism by which LPS activates mammalian immune cells, Beutler used TNF production as a phenotypic endpoint to identify the LPS receptor. Identification of the receptor hinged on the positional cloning of the mammalian Lps locus, which had been known since the 1960s as a key genetic determinant of all biological responses to LPS. Beutler thus discovered the key sensors of microbial infection in mammals, demonstrating that one of the mammalian Toll-like receptors, TLR4, acts as the membrane-spanning component of the mammalian LPS receptor complex. The research on TLRs won him the Nobel Prize in 2011.

In the course of their work, Beutler and his colleagues identified genes required for other important biological processes, including the regulation of iron absorption,hearing, and embryonic development, since their disruption by ENU created strikingly abnormal visible phenotypes.

A new accelerator to study steps on the path to fusion

sciencenote:

“NDCX-II is a textbook example of team science done well,” says Suzanne Suskind, Federal Project Director in DOE’s Berkeley Site Office. “Scientists and engineers from Berkeley, Livermore, and Princeton worked together seamlessly to achieve this important milestone and fulfill the charge of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to help spur further technological advances in science.”

The eventual goal of heavy-ion fusion is to produce electrical power with particle accelerators through a process called inertial confinement fusion. Heavy-ion fusion is a particularly promising method of accessing this inherently clean and virtually limitless source of energy, fueled by naturally occurring hydrogen isotopes. There’s plenty of practical science to be done along the way to that goal, both in accelerator design and in the physics of the fusion-fuel targets.

…

“What makes NDCX-II unique is the ion beam’s charged-particle density,” says Kwan, “The beam is optimized to deposit most of its energy in the thin target itself, heating it instantly to warm dense matter conditions.”