ScienceChanges

Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture begins with the intriguing question: how can one account for the remarkable transvaluation of the computer from a Cold War accessory to omnicide and 'soul murder' into a convivial tool of personal liberation, all within 30 years? Specifically, in Berkeley in 1964, 'disembodiment - that is, the transformation of the self into data on an IBM card - marked the height of dehumanization', while for the digital utopians of the 1990s, 'it marked the route to new forms of equality and transformation.'

"Time for Everyone" is a unique opportunity to learn about the origins, evolution, and future of public time from some of the foremost authorities in many branches of time measurement.

"In 2004, statistician Joseph Chang, computer scientist Douglas Rohde, and writer Steve Olson used a computer model of human genetics to show that anyone who was alive 2,000-3,000 years ago is either the ancestor of everyone who's now alive, or no one at all. Think about that: If a person alive in 1,000 BCE has any descendants alive today, they have all of us-even people from different continents and isolated populations. "

"The consensus on how destructive this system is to our planet's carrying-capacity is now clear. Yet the fact that consumerism answers our deep human needs for novelty and status - however inadequately - is rarely acknowledged. Can any appeal to transform our lifestyle priorities in a sustainable direction really ignore how radical we are as animals? How does it properly reckon with the irrepressible faculties of cognition and imagination that humans deploy to make our world anew?"

Masters of Public Health students from the University of Michigan will be posting weekly articles as they learn how to translate complex science into something a broad audience can understand and appreciate.

"Smart technologies are not just disruptive; they can also preserve the status quo. Revolutionary in theory, they are often reactionary in practice. "

"improvscience accelerates effective collaboration. learn to build rapport, boost listening skills, and build with people across research areas and disciplines."

"Female professors were just as biased against women students as their male colleagues, and biology professors just as biased as physics professors - even though more than half of biology majors are women, whereas men far outnumber women in physics. "

"Innovative thinking: Can you be taught?: Roberta B. Ness" (using examples from her field of epidemiology & health)

series of webinars & forums in Sept. '12

"Institutional events, individuals, firms, politics, ecology, families are all different meaningful context which we can study applying the systemic paradigm"

Disease isn't synonymous with its etiological agent or the map of its victims, whether or not either is placed within a... context that acknowledges the functional ecologies humans, livestock and wildlife share. [This] misses the structural factors underlying pathogen emergence and by virtue of that omission the pathogens' likely reemergence. Every one of the new potentially human-specific influenzas, for instance, have evolved out of industrial poultry and livestock. "

"I don't like raising problems when I cannot see a solution. But..."

a review of books by a biologist, a sociologist, a lawyer "Understanding race as a producer of health outcomes, but not a result of genetic programming, doesn't suggest that we abandon biomedical research as it relates to race, but it does suggest that looking for race-oriented genetic precursors of disease is a fruitless labor."