Academic LOLcats

It seems that LOLcats are getting into academia and refereed papers:

Here’s another academic LOLcat.

Calgary health services are overwhelmed

Average wait times have jumped to 13 hours. And that’s in the only province that has so much oil income that it doesn’t feel the need to charge retail sales tax. This is partly the fault of centrist planning, and also of trimming services. The hospitals are 98% percent full. They can keep up with a slow, steady trickle of emergencies. But emergencies don’t come in a trickle: they’re unpredictable, stochastic. A report calls for some changes.

Tangled Bank #89 at Aardvarkaeology

Tune in to Aardvarkaeology for the 89th Tangled Bank–a fortnightly collection of blog articles on science.

What is "scientifically literate"?

The First Prize Winner of this year’s Seed Science Writing Contest answers the question: What does it mean to be scientifically literate in the 21st Century? THOMAS W. MARTIN is an Honors Faculty Fellow at Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ. It starts out:

Over the past few decades, growing evidence from cognitive science has revealed significant limits on the ability of individuals to criticize their own viewpoints.

Continues:

The goal of science is to find those ideas that can withstand the long and hard barrage of evidence-based argument.

Reminds us:

Many commentators have rightly implored us to make certain that young people encounter the “thrill” of discovery. While this is undeniably desirable, it is arguably even more crucial that they experience the agony (if only on a modest scale) of having a pet hypothesis demolished by facts.

This was something that I had to learn as a technical communicator: I had to let my precious words be critiqued by others to make sure that everyone could understand them. My writing, style, definitions, presentation, conceptual descriptions, and even audience analysis had to be not close to my heart but out in the world and standing up for themselves. If they missed the mark, they had to be altered or eliminated. I had to let them go and concentrate not on my productions but on the product and its result. If it didn’t convey the needed information to the right audience, it was wrong.

Read the whole essay. It’s a pleasure.