In which I repeat what I said two years ago, because it seems even more relevant now (when state budgets have throttled school budgets and the current U.S. President has identified education as a national priority):
Author Archives: admin
DonorsChoose 2009 Social Media Challenge: How we did.
Hey ScienceBlogs readers: you rock!
In a year where lots of folks are waiting for the signs of economic recovery to be manifest in their daily lives, and where public school budgets have been even more hard hit than they were a year ago, your generosity helped us significantly surpass the impact of our October 2008 drive.
Let’s break it down:
Some tactics always stink.
Abel and Orac and Isis have recently called attention to the flak Amy Wallace had been getting for her recent article in WIRED Magazine, “An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All”. The flak Wallace has gotten, as detailed in her Twitter feed (from which Abel constructed a compilation):
I’ve been called stupid, greedy, a whore, a prostitute, and a “fking lib.” I’ve been called the author of “heinous tripe.”
J.B. Handley, the founder of Generation Rescue, the anti-vaccine group that actress Jenny McCarthy helps promote, sent an essay title” “Paul Offit Rapes (intellectually) Amy Wallace and Wired Magazine.” In it, he implied that Offit had slipped me a date rape drug. “The roofie cocktails at Paul Offit’s house must be damn good,” he wrote. Later, he sent a revised version that omitted rape and replaced it with the image of me drinking Offit’s Kool-aid. That one was later posted at the anti-vaccine blog Age of Autism. You can read that blog here.
I’ve been told I’ll think differently “if you live to grow up.” I’ve been warned that “this article will haunt you for a long time.” Just now, I got an email so sexually explicit that I can’t paraphrase it here. Except to say it contained the c-word and a reference to dead fish.
Since the scientific issues around vaccination (including the lack of evidence to demonstrate a link between vaccinations and autism) are well-covered in these parts (especially at Orac’s pad and by Mike The Mad Biologist), I just want to speak briefly about the strategy that seems to be embodied by these reactions to Wallace’s article.
A bit peckish.
Is it too soon to dip into that bowl of “fun-size” candy bars while we wait for it to get dark?
DonorsChoose 2009 Social Media Challenge: Last day of the drive!
Happy Hallowe’en and welcome to the last day of the 2009 Social Media Challenge. With your help, ScienceBlogs bloggers have raised more than $56,000 to help public school teachers pay for classroom supplies, fund field trips, and support activities to help their students learn.
Today is the end of the drive, so if you’ve been hanging back — or if you’ve found some money in the pocket of that winter coat you’ve just dug out of the closet — this is a great time to help make a difference. And, if you make a donation through my challenge page, you can still get in on some fabulous prizes, including sprog art.
Indeed, here’s some art from the younger Free-Ride offspring to encourage you to give what you can!
(Oh yeah, and since you all helped me raise more than $3,000, I’ll be composing, singing, and posting a philosophy of science song for you. Gulp!)
Basic concepts: Truth.
No, I’m not going to be able to get away with claiming that truth is beauty, and beauty, truth.
The first issue in understanding truth is recognizing that truth is a property of a proposition. (What’s a proposition? A proposition is a claim.) A proposition that is true has a certain kind of correspondence with the world about which it is making a claim. A proposition that is false does not have this correspondence.
At the most basic level, what we want from this correspondence seems pretty obvious: what the propositions says about the world matches up with how the world actually is.
Friday Sprog Blogging: experiments currently underway.
The Free-Ride offspring have been rather busy recently, what with the approach of Hallowe’en and the rapidly approaching end of their regular soccer season. (The post-season, of course, falls after this weekend’s time change, which means practices will either be earlier or darker.) Still, each of them has found time for an experiment they’d like to share.
From the elder Free-Ride offspring, a model of the water cycle:
How did we do at dialogue?
In a recent post, I issued an invitation:
I am always up for a dialogue on the issue of our moral relation to animals and on the ethical use of animals in scientific research. If folks inclined towards the animal rights stance want to engage in a dialogue right here, in the comments on this post, I am happy to host it.
(I will not, however, be hosting a debate. A dialogue is different from a debate, and a dialogue is what I’m prepared to host.)
That post has received upward of 250 comments, so there was certainly some sort of exchange going on. But, did we manage to have something approaching a dialogue, or did we end up slipping into a debate?
In considering this question, I want to offer a grid I encountered in the Difficult Dialogues Initiative at San Jose State University, adapted from material from the Public Conversations Project. The grid compares characteristics of dialogues and arguments (which are not precisely the same as debates but are probably close enough for our purposes here):
Signs of the times.
The times in question being, in this case, the last days of October.
Once upon a Tuesday morning, while I wandered, cold and yawning,
Up the grimy stair steps winding skyward toward my office door,
On the wall’s bile-greenish surface, noticed I a note whose purpose
Took more consciousness to process than I’d had the step before.
“English majors strike,” I murmured, “with tactics I’ve not seen before,
Reciting Poe and nothing more.”
DonorsChoose 2009 Social Media Challenge: help to increase my share of the HP funds and I’ll sing for you.
As I noted earlier this week, Hewlett-Packard is going to be distributing another $200,000 in the DonorsChoose 2009 Social Media Challenge. They’re dividing up that pool of money according to how much each challenge has raised as a proportion of the total funds raised by this Sunday. In other words, if my challenge were to raise an amount equivalent to 1% of the total take by Sunday, HP would add another $2000 to fund the projects in my challenge.
If we were to get enough of an extra kick from HP to break $3000, I would gladly deliver the “big reward” I promised to you (and the internets) collectively.