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Since it doesn't have a lot of commercial appeal, most of the people working in the area, and the vast majority of those publishing the scientific literature, work in academic departments or at government agencies. Penn State, home of noted climatologists Richard Alley and Michael Mann, has a strong geosciences department and, conveniently, makes the department's salary information available. It's easy to check, and find that the average tenured professor earned about $120,000 last year, and a new hire a bit less than $70,000.

That's a pretty healthy salary by many standards, but it's hardly a racket. Penn State appears to be on the low end of similar institutions, and is outdone by two other institutions in its own state (based on this report). But, more significantly for the question at hand, we can see that Earth Sciences faculty aren't paid especially well. Sure, they do much better than the Arts faculty, but they're somewhere in the middle of the pack, and get stomped on by professors in the Business and IT departments.

This is all, of course, ignoring what someone who can do the sort of data analysis or modeling of complex systems that climatologists perform might make if they went to Wall Street.

The SavetheInternet.com Coalition is two million everyday people who have banded together with thousands of nonprofit organizations, businesses and bloggers to protect Internet freedom. The Coalition believes that the Internet is a crucial engine for economic growth, civic engagement and free speech. We're working together to preserve Net Neutrality, the First Amendment of the Internet, which ensures that the Internet remains open to new ideas, innovation and voices. Because of Net Neutrality, the Internet has always been a level playing field. People everywhere can have their voices heard by thousands, even millions, of others online. The SavetheInternet.com Coalition wants our leaders in Washington to pass strong Net Neutrality protections. We're calling on the president, Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to stand with the public and keep the Internet open.

The first Chief Scientist for Australia, Penny Sackett, resigned this week halfway into her five-year term, citing personal and professional reasons.  The Australian media has reported that during her tenure Professor Sackett met with Kevin Rudd once and has never briefed Julia Gillard. In a Senate hearing yesterday, Professor Sackett downplayed any conflict.

Even so, the distance from top level policy making is at distinct odds with how the position of Chief Scientist is officially described (PDF): The Chief Scientist for Australia, Professor Penny D Sackett, provides high-level independent advice to the Prime Minister and other Ministers on matters relating to science, technology and innovation. . . While responsive to requests from Government for advice generated as a result of emerging issues, Professor Sackett also provides proactive advice to the Prime Minister on issues she deems important in securing Australia’s wellbeing into the future.

Nature reports the views of a few leading Australian scientists on the role of Chief Scientist: “I don’t think the chief scientist’s role is very highly regarded by Australian governments,” said Peter Doherty, a Nobel prize-winning immunologist from the University of Melbourne. Doherty said Sackett was a victim of the new political landscape in Australia that evolveed while she was in office, largely shaped by the fact that the government is now in a minority. “I think new appointee would have to be pretty naïve going into this parliament if they thought they were going to make much of a difference, except on something the government is already looking to do, such as putting a price on carbon.” “I suspect that Penny Sackett probably signed up for a job that was different to the one that she ended up having to do,” agreed materials scientist Cathy Foley, president of the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies, who served with Sackett on the Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council. “I think when it comes to policy development, science has been the loser for the sake of political concerns.”

An earthquake hit L’Aquila, Italy on April 6th, 2009, killing 309 people. Prior to this event, six scientists and one government official were assembled into a task force charged with deciding whether recent “increases in seismic activity in the area” were putting citizens in any danger. The events are a little muddled, but the gist is this: the task force relaid some potentially positive feelings to the “deputy technical head of Italy’s Civil Protection Agency” who then made a statement to the press. The statement was “The scientific community tells me there is no danger because there is an ongoing discharge of energy. The situation looks favourable.”

The official felt this positive outlook was the message the committee wanted to relay, yet the committee obviously states that they didn’t say anything conclusive — after all, earthquake science isn’t exact. In general, the whole affair sounds pretty confusing, with the lawyers “in some cases implicitly blaming each other’s clients.”

is building codes that should be re-examined, but perhaps the best thing to do is to combine both solutions: consider better building practices while at the same time urging those in the lab to err on the side of caution — heavily — when human lives are at stake.

The New York solar map just debuted at the fifth annual Solar Summit. Solvecimate News reports: “The map is an important part of this effort,” said Tria Case, who heads the New York City solar map project as director of sustainability for the university. “It’s a tool that building and homeowners, installers, city officials and Con Ed can use.” The map is exact. During night flights over New Yok in May 2010, a twin-engine plane equipped with lasers captured the architecture of the city. From these images, CUNY’s Center for Advanced Research of Spatial Information created a 3-D model of the city. “It’s as if we shrink-wrapped the entire city in paper lined with a one-meter grid and got the exact elevation and horizontal location of each square meter,” Sean Ahearn, the geographer who directs the center, told SolveClimate News. Ahearn said the site incorporates so many bytes of information that it took a supercomputer with 10 processors some 50 hours to generate the map interface. The website can calculate how much solar radiation hits every square meter of the city — every hour, every day for an entire year. For building owners it means they can size up of the solar energy potential of their rooftops within minutes.

There are three broad camps in contemporary debates over bioethics. In the name of human rights and human dignity, “bio-conservatives” tend to support restricting, regulating and stigmatizing the technologies that allow us to create, manipulate and destroy embryonic life. In the name of scientific progress and human freedom, “bio-libertarians” tend to oppose any restrictions on what individuals, doctors and researchers are allowed to do. Then somewhere in between are the anguished liberals, who are uncomfortable with what they see as the absolutism of both sides, and who tend to argue that society needs to decide where to draw its bioethical lines not based on some general ideal (like “life” or “choice”), but rather case by case by case — accepting this kind of abortion but not that kind; this use of embryos but not that use; existing developments in genetic engineering but not, perhaps, the developments that await us in the future.

at least in the United States, the liberal effort to (as the Goodman of 1980 put it) “monitor” and “debate” and “control” the development of reproductive technologies has been extraordinarily ineffectual. From embryo experimentation to selective reduction to the eugenic uses of abortion, liberals always promise to draw lines and then never actually manage to draw them. Like Dr. Evans, they find reasons to embrace each new technological leap while promising to resist the next one — and then time passes, science marches on, and they find reasons why the next moral compromise, too, must be accepted for the greater good, or at least tolerated in the name of privacy and choice. You can always count on them to worry, often perceptively, about hypothetical evils, potential slips down the bioethical slope. But they’re either ineffectual or accommodating once an evil actually arrives. Tomorrow, they always say — tomorrow, we’ll draw the line. But tomorrow never comes.

LONDON - Scientific advances including techniques allowing patients to grow new joints inside their own bodies will allow the elderly to remain active well beyond their 100th birthdays, researchers claim. British scientists are working on a system which should allow the elderly to buy body parts "off the shelf" and even regenerate their own damaged joints and hearts. Their ultimate aim is to fix up the body with customised replacement parts grown to order. They have already carried out human trials on heart valves which are still working four years after they were transplanted. At the University of Leeds, Britain's biggest bioengineering unit and the world leader in artificial joint replacement research is coordinating a project that aims to give people 50 active years after the age of 50."It is the rise of the bionic pensioner," said Professor Christina Doyle, whose company is working with the university to develop the new technologies. "The idea is when something wears out, your surgeon can buy a replacement off the shelf or, more accurately, in a bag."The university is spending £50 million ($114 million) over the next five years on the new project. The main thrust of the research centres on a method of tissue and medical engineering which the university is at the forefront of developing. Led by the immunologist Professor Eileen Ingham, they are pioneering a technique of stripping the living cells from donor human and animal parts, leaving just the collagen or elastin "scaffold" of the tissue. These "biological shells", which could be for knee, ankle or hip ligaments, as well as blood vessels and heart valves, are then transplanted into the patient whose own body then invades them replacing the removed cells with their own. The technique, which could be available within five years, effectively removes the need for anti-rejection drugs. It is similar to the recently developed system of using stem cells to regrow organs outside the body, but costs about a tenth of the price.

Labelling the pump that dispenses in ml/hr in a different color from the pump that dispenses in ml/day would be an obvious remedy that would have addressed the KK incident. It's the common-sensical solution that anyone can think of.

Sometimes, design flaws like that really do occur because engineers can't see the wood for the trees.

But sometimes the team is aware of these issues and highlights them to management, but the manufacturer still proceeds as before. Why is that? Because in addition to design principles, one must be mindful that there are always business considerations at play as well. Manufacturing two (or more) separate designs for pumps incurs greater costs, eliminates the ability to standardize across pumps, increases holding inventory, and overall increases complexity of business and manufacturing processes, and decreases economies of scale. All this naturally reduces profitability.It's not just pumps. Even medicines are typically sold in identical-looking vials with identically colored vial caps, with only the text on the vial labels differentiating them in both drug type and concentration. You can imagine what kinds of accidents can potentially happen there.

brain-computer interface, or BCI

is a branch of science exploring how computers and the human brain can be meshed together. It sounds like science fiction (and can look like it too), but it is motivated by a desire to help chronically injured people. They include those who have lost limbs, people with Lou Gehrig's disease, or those who have been paralysed by severe spinal-cord injuries. But the group of people it might help the most are those whom medicine assumed were beyond all hope: sufferers of "locked-in syndrome".

These are often stroke victims whose perfectly healthy minds end up trapped inside bodies that can no longer move. The most famous example was French magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby who managed to dictate a memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, by blinking one eye. In the book, Bauby, who died in 1997 shortly after the book was published, described the prison his body had become for a mind that still worked normally.

Humanity’s End. The main premise of the book is that proposals that would supposedly promise to make us smarter like never before or add thousands of years to our live seem rather far fetched and the domain of mere fantasy. However, it is these very proposals which form the basis of many of the ideas and thoughts presented by advocates of radical enhancement and which are beginning to move from the sidelines to the centre of main stream discussion. A variety of technologies and therapies are being presented to us as options to expand our capabilities and capacities in order for us to become something other than human.

Agar takes issue with this and argues against radical human enhancement. He structures his analysis and discussion by focusing on four key figures and their proposals which help to form the core of the case for radical enhancement debate.  First to be examined by Agar is Ray Kurzweil who argues that Man and Machine will become one as technology allows us to transcend our biology. Second, is Aubrey de Grey who is a passionate advocate and pioneer of anti-ageing therapies which allow us to achieve “longevity escape velocity”. Next is Nick Bostrom, a leading transhumanist who defends the morality and rationality of enhancement and finally James Hughes who is a keen advocate of a harmonious democracy of the enhanced and un-enhanced.

He avoids falling into any of the pitfalls of basing his argument solely upon the “playing God” question but instead seeks to posit a well founded argument in favour of the precautionary principle.

digital "curators" choose and present things related to a specific topic and context. They "curate", as opposed to "aggregate", which implies plain collecting with little or no value add. Viewed in this context, Google search does the latter, not the former. So, who curates? The Huffington Post, or HuffPo, is one high-profile example and, it appears, a highly-valued one too, going by AOL numbers-crunchers who forked out US$315 million (S$396.9 million) to acquire it. Accolades have also come in for Arianna Huffington's team of contributors and more than 3,000 bloggers - from politicians to celebrities to think-tankers. The website was named second among the 25 best blogs of 2009 by Time magazine, and most powerful blog in the world by The Observer.

By sifting, sorting and presenting news and views - yes, "curating" - HuffPo makes itself useful in an age of too much information and too many opinions. (Strictly speaking, HuffPo is both a creator and curator.) If what HuffPo is doing seems deja vu, it is hardly surprising. Remember the good old "curated" news of the pre-Internet days when newspapers decided what news was published and what we read? Then, the Editor was the Curator with the capital "C".

But with the arrival of the Internet and the uploading of news and views by organisations and netizens, the bits and bytes have turned into a tsunami. Aggregators like Google search threw us some life buoys, using text and popularity to filter the content. But with millions of new articles and videos added to the Internet daily, the "right" content has become that proverbial needle in the haystack. Hence the need for curation.

But not all documentaries take such a novel approach. Randy Olson, a marine biologist-turned-filmmaker at the University of Southern California, is a harsh critic of what he sees as a very literal-minded, information-heavy approach within the environmental film genre. Well-intentioned environmental documentary filmmakers are just “making their same, boring, linear, one-dimensional explorations of issues,” said Olson. “The public’s not buying it.”

The problem may run deeper than audience tallies — after all, An Inconvenient Truth currently ranks as the sixth-highest grossing documentary in the United States. However, a 2010 study by social psychologist Jessica Nolan found that while the film increased viewers’ concern about global warming, that concern didn’t translate into any substantial action a month later.

To move a larger audience to action, Olson advocates a shift from the literal-minded world of documentary into the imaginative world of narrative.

As a verbal artifact, farmed content exhibits neither style nor substance.

The insultingly vacuous and frankly bizarre prose of the content farms — it seems ripped from Wikipedia and translated from the Romanian — cheapens all online information.

These prose-widgets are not hammered out by robots, surprisingly. But they are written by writers who work like robots. As recent accounts of life in these words-are-money mills make clear, some content-farm writers have deadlines as frequently as every 25 minutes. Others are expected to turn around reported pieces, containing interviews with several experts, in an hour. Some compose, edit, format and publish 10 articles in a single shift. Many with decades of experience in journalism work 70-hour weeks for salaries of $40,000 with no vacation time. The content farms have taken journalism hackwork to a whole new level.

Since the shale gas revolution and resulting confirmation of enormous domestic gas reserves, there has been a relatively small group of analysts and geologists who have doubted the future of shale gas.  Their doubts have become very convenient to the environmental activists I mentioned earlier. This particular NYT reporter has apparently sought out a few of the doubters to fashion together a negative view of the U.S. natural gas industry. We also believe certain media outlets, especially the once venerable NYT, are being manipulated by those whose environmental or economic interests are being threatened by abundant natural gas supplies. We have seen for example today an email from a leader of a group called the Environmental Working Group who claimed today’s articles as this NYT reporter’s "second great story" (the first one declaring that produced water disposal from shale gas wells was unsafe) and that “we've been working with him for over 8 months. Much more to come. . .”

this reporter’s claim of impending scarcity of natural gas supply contradicts the facts and the scientific extrapolation of those facts by the most sophisticated reservoir engineers and geoscientists in the world. Not just at Chesapeake, but by experts at many of the world’s leading energy companies that have made multi-billion-dollar, long-term investments in U.S. shale gas plays, with us and many other companies. Notable examples of these companies, besides the leading independents such as Chesapeake, Devon, Anadarko, EOG, EnCana, Talisman and others, include these leading global energy giants:  Exxon, Shell, BP, Chevron, Conoco, Statoil, BHP, Total, CNOOC, Marathon, BG, KNOC, Reliance, PetroChina, Mitsui, Mitsubishi and ENI, among others.  Is it really possible that all of these companies, with a combined market cap of almost $2 trillion, know less about shale gas than a NYT reporter, a few environmental activists and a handful of shale gas doubters?

Facebook Friend Exporter wasn’t designed with Google+ in mind (version 1 was in fact released in November 2010), but it has exploded in the past week as Google+ beta users look for ways to port over all their Facebook friends to Google+. Facebook clearly noticed a spike in usage (the extension now has more than 17,000 users), and decided to block it. Mansour says that Facebook removed emails from their mobile site, which were critical to the original design of his extension. He told me that the company had implemented a throttling mechanism: if you visit any friend page five times in a short period of time, the email field is removed.

“Facebook is actually hiding data (email) from you to see when your friends explicitly shared that to you,” Mansour told me in an e-mail. “Making it really hard to scrape because the only missing data is your emails, and that is your friends identity. Nothing else is.”

As CNET points out, Facebook Friend Exporter technically violates Facebook’s Terms of Service. Section 3.2 states the following: You will not collect users’ content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission. Mansour doesn’t care about this, as he says in the extension’s description: Get *your* data contact out of Facebook, whether they want you to or not. You gave them your friends and allowed them to store that data, and you have right to take it back out! Facebook doesn’t own my friends.