Wrong!

Quiz Question:
What is wrong with this model of computation?

August 3, 2011

In the news today: “Governments, IOC and UN hit by massive cyber attack” (BBC) How did the attack work? In a mind-numbingly ordinary way: “An email would be sent to an individual with the right level of access within the system; attached to the message was a piece of malware which would then execute and [...]

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I blame a deep flaw
in current software technology

April 12, 2011

Metamodern had vanished at the end of last month while I was traveling, and for a week or so I forwarded it to this stand-in page. As you can see, the blog is now up and running. The stand-in page outlines a (re)emerging software technology that deserves several orders of magnitude more attention. Current software [...]

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Nano drug carrier (!!!)

December 8, 2010

This news just in: A ‘buckyball’ — a spherical molecule made up of 60 carbon atoms — has been turned into a vial just big enough to hold a single water molecule…. The authors say that uses for the vial could include acting as a carrier for drugs in the body. (News item) As The [...]

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Why We Get Fat

December 8, 2010

Gary Taubes has started a blog, and his first post nicely summarizes his case against the idea that overeating causes obesity: A tiny caloric imbalance of ~1% (only while actively gaining weight, of course) isn’t a cause of obesity, it’s a consequence of the onset of obesity, which is itself best understood as a consequence [...]

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A meta-meta-analysis from the CDC

November 30, 2010

As a meta-oriented post, Metamodern is pleased to report a meta-meta-analysis. In this month’s issue of the CDC-sponsored journal Preventing Chronic Disease, we find, published as a “Systematic Review”: Quality of Systematic Reviews of Observational Nontherapeutic Studies …Of the 145 systematic reviews we found, fewer than half met each quality criterion; 49% reported study flow, [...]

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Why “Science Policy”
is a mistake from the start

October 29, 2010

Science and engineering drive the great technological revolutions of our time, and it might be helpful to have some idea of what they are — for example, to recognize that they are fundamentally different. Colin Macilwain offers a guide for the perplexed: Science is mainly concerned with unearthing knowledge. Engineering seeks to deliver working solutions [...]

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Out of the memory-hole:
A historian speaks out on nanotechnology

September 24, 2010

A recent retrospective on the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative (Nature, 1 Sept 2010) repeats the story that strong excitement about nanotechnology “began at the birth of the NNI [established in 2000] and peaked in the middle of the decade”. This paints a strange and false picture. Excitement launched the bureaucracy, not vice versa, and it [...]

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Chemists deserve more credit (2):
   The 150th anniversary
    of the first international science conference

September 10, 2010

In this week’s Chemical & Engineering News, the American Chemical Society marks the 150th anniversary of the world’s first scientific conference — yes, a chemistry conference — held Sept. 3, 1860, in Karlsruhe, Germany. August Kekulé Atomic scientist,conference organizer Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz The guy who gets the credit August Kekulé suggested idea of [...]

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Which came first, the Nano or the NNI?

September 5, 2010

A news article in this week’s Nature discusses the origin of the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative, but the story sets some of the causality in reverse. The story outlines how science advocacy at the Federal level in 1999 led to presidential and congressional support in 2000, and says that afterward… …a certain amount of hype [...]

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High-school civics and minds,
1890 and now

September 2, 2010

A comment on my recent post, “The problem: a metacognition deficit,” reminded me of a striking illustration of cultural change, the level of the language and content of a book used in the 1890s to teach high school civics (available in plain text, a big pdf and simulated in-browser book ). It reeks of a [...]

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The problem: a metacognition deficit

August 27, 2010

…there’s a metacognition deficit. Very few in public life habitually step back and think about the weakness in their own thinking and what they should do to compensate… Of the problems that afflict the country, this is the underlying one. David Brooks, (“A Case of Mental Courage”, New York Times) Brooks begins with the story [...]

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Super Battery!!!

July 14, 2010

A benchmark for judging hype: WSU Researchers Use Super-high Pressures to Create Super Battery The researchers created the material on the Pullman campus…The cell contained xenon difluoride (XeF2), a white crystal used to etch silicon conductors, squeezed between two small diamond anvils….The researchers eventually increased the pressure to more than a million atmospheres, comparable to [...]

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