Newbiz New: This and That

Katy B�rner from the project "Places & Spaces: Mapping Science," who came with her poster exhibition to our 2008 conference on Science, Society and Information Technology, has written a book called "Atlas of Science: Visualizing what we know." I haven't read it, but there's a review in a recent issue of Nature which most of you probably can't access, and another review in Seed Magazine which will give you an impression of what the book is about. If you have an interest in visualizing data and/or the structure of scientific communities and the process of knowledge discovery, this might be interesting for you.

A PS to my post on Cosmic Strings that summarized a recent study on the gravitational wave emmission from Cosmic Superstrings' cusps. According to the study's results, the presence of extra dimensions would suppresses the signal, possibly too much to be observable. In a new paper, O'Callaghan and Gregory have now studied the signal from kinks, claiming that the suppression is not as pronounced as the one from cusps.

Some months ago, during one of my hospital stays, I received another inquiry seeking permission to use one of my figures for what I thought would be an illustration of some essay on gravitons. My reply was essentially "yeah, whatever," just in some more words. I now was sent a link to the result, a digital book, in French, called "Du LIVRE de Mallarm� au livre mal arm�." The website is here, and you can download the ebook here. It looks to me like a collection of sciency philosophy essays. My figure appears in section "14.59�" - whatever that might mean. If your French is better than mine, please let me know in the comments what this compilation is all about!

Here's an article I filed in the category "Complete Bullshit:" Daniel Sarewitz in Slate claiming, in a nutshell, that it's a problem Republicans are represented among US scientists in a smaller percentage than among the US population: "No wonder the Republicans are suspicious of the science," he writes and goes on to make a case that "the scientific community should be willing to investigate and discuss the issue" because this situation is clearly politically incorrect. I had the intention to get upset about this article, but it's so completely bullshit it's not even worth the effort, so I just let you read it. Don't miss the comments.

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