MSM Jumps the Shark

Mainstream media (MSM) is on the decline and perhaps there was no better explanation than what happened on the Daily Show this week.

With the global economy still in a nosedive, none of the traditional journalistic media (television, radio or newspapers) have gone after those whose short term get-rich schemes blew-up and brought down the economy.  In fact, many MSM outlets were complicit by convincing the public that the economic 'bus' was in great shape, when they should have seen that it was heading over a cliff.

Why did it take a comedy news show to express the outrage that the public feels toward both those who created this crisis and those who helped them?

What was really surprising about the beating that Jim Cramer (poster boy for the complicit MSM financial news outlet, CNBC) took this past Thursday from Jon Stewart, host of the Daily Show, was his total inability to defend his actions. This strongly suggests that many people, like Cramer, knew all along that the cliff was ahead, but decided to party on regardless.

When the New York Times is in a position where they are giving front page coverage to an example of exceptional journalism on a comedy news show, I'm thinking that the MSM has just jumped the shark.

Click here to link to the episode available in Canada.

Photo Credit: Associated Press.  Daily Show (Comedy Central Channel), March 12, 2009.  Left to right: Jim Cramer, Jon Stewart.

Vampires in Another Age

Forensic archaeologist Matteo Borrini from the University of Florence has discovered evidence of the late-medieval belief in vampires.  A skeleton unearthed from a plague burial site near Venice, believed to date from the mid-1500s has been found with a brick placed in the mouth.  It is thought this was an attempt to stop what was believed to be a vampire from feeding.

Plague victims were often wrapped in a burial cloth and placed into mass graves.  These graves often needed to be opened up to add new bodies.  It was noticed that some recently interred  plague victims were bloated with what seemed like blood in the mouths.  The thinking was the bodies were bloated from the consumption of blood.  

Today we understand the bloating arises from gas production in the intestines following death.  Further, the blood in the mouth was likely simply fluid from decomposition.  Holes in the burial cloths near the mouth, interpreted as the vampire chewing through the cloth, probably arose from the decomposition fluids dissolving the cloth.

It isn't hard to understand how such beliefs arose.  The plague had been killing millions of people throughout Europe since the mid-1300s and germ theory would not be developed for centuries. There was real cause for fear.  Spontaneous generation (that is, the formation of life from decaying material)  was widely accepted and supernatural beliefs such as witchcraft were strongly supported by the Church.

Photo Credit: Matteo Borrini. New Scientist. March 06, 2009.

Who's Connected?

Maps of academic discipline relatedness are not new.  Traditionally, those who study how academic disciplines interact have looked at the citations in publications.  In a new study, Bollen and colleagues have used the way academics click between publications listed by research search engines.  The full map, seen above, may be found by clicking here.

At Thompson Rivers University (TRU) there is one particular linkage that is interesting.  TRU is currently considering re-organizing faculties and one idea is to place social work and nursing together(positioned at 9 o'clock on the main map).  It is an idea that has raised concerns in both schools.  However, if you look at the map section expanded below, this just might make sense.

Data source: Bollen and others.  2009. Clickstream data yields high resolution maps of science. PLos One 4(3): e4803.

Welcome to Town

This past fall, a male Tegeneria agrestis (the Hobo spider), shown above, dashed across my living room floor late one night.  It's size and rapid movement caught my eye right away so it was quickly scooped up and off to my lab for identification (the pattern of the eyes and structure of the male palps is diagnostic).  A month later a female of the same species also turned up in my living room.  The fall is the usual time to see these spiders moving about as it is their mating season.

This is a first record for this species in Williams Lake so I needed to get the identification confirmed.  Robb Bennett, a spider specialist  in British Columbia has now confirmed these as Hobos.

The Hobo has spread across southern BC over the past several years.  It has an ill deserved reputation for being venomous, giving rise to lesions around the bite site.  How this belief started is unclear, but physicians often spread this idea to patients with lesions of unknown cause.  The Hobo is a European species and there are no European records suggesting this spider is venomous.  Further, there are no confirmed problems with this spider here either, still the rumors persist.

How widespread this spider might be in Williams Lake is unknown.  It is unlikely, however, that the only male and female happened to end up in the home of someone who could identify them.

Photo Credit: Me.  Smallest units on the photograph are millimetres.

Photography in the 21st Century

A year or two ago the Gigapan project began to create ultrahigh resolution photographs of notable places and events.  Recently the inauguration of Barack Obama was photographed using this technique.  As the name suggests the file sizes are huge, so to make this manageable, it isn't necessary to download these photos to view them.  

Above is Hanauma Bay on the Hawaiian Island of Oahu.  At their website (click here) you will find a link to this particular photograph.  Yes, you can zoom in to see who on the beach has a navel piercing.

Is that all?  No, Microsoft (you remember Microsoft?), has developed new free software called PhotoSynth (Photosynth.net) in which uploaded photos are compared and spatially linked.  This allows you to move from one photograph to another across a landscape or around an object which has been photographed from different angles.  If you have an expensive product you want to show potential buyers, take a series of photographs from different angles, upload and viola!

This was also done at Obama's Inauguration allowing you to move through the crowd in a variety of directions, jumping from one photograph to another.  However, it does require that you download some free software and create an account to view these synched photos.  Worth it? Sure.  You can even browse through a penguin colony.

Worth Five Minutes

Remind me one day to discuss Ant Colony Optimization Algorithms

Hat Tip: Myrmecos blog

Source: Bentekr (Posted on YouTube May 18, 2008).  Check out Bentekr's other Miniscule postings such as the Fight for the Lollipop.

Are We Alone?

Barely visible inside the circle is our planet, Earth.  This is the most distant image ever taken of our home world.  It was taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 at a distance of approximately 6 billion kilometres (5.6 light HOURS).

Credit for the photo must go to Carl Sagan for insisting that Voyager 1, as it left our solar system, turn around and take one last picture.  It is called the Pale Blue Dot.

Consider the task astronomers have taken upon themselves now.  This morning a new space telescope called Kepler was launched.  Its task is to detect similar sized planets, from a distance of thousands of light YEARS.

Over three hundred new planets have been discovered in the past fifteen years orbiting stars in our galaxy.  The instruments used have limited the discovery to very large planets by either measuring the gravitational wobble they produce in their home suns as they orbit, or by measuring the tiny decline in light that occurs as they pass across the face of their suns.

It is the latter technique that Kepler will employ to find Earth-like planets, a task of incredible precision.  Many media articles are suggesting that Kepler will discover life on other planets.  Not so.  It will simply determine if other planets similar in size to Earth exist and if they are in orbits where temperatures are conducive to what we think Life requires.  

If we find such planets then we may begin to really appreciate the probability that we are not alone.  We should know in a few years.

Photo Credit: Voyager 1. NASA.