A couple of weeks ago I pointed out that there's a "name that species" competition going on. Well, the top seven finalists have now been named, and now's your chance to vote for your favorite. Be sure to read the accompanying explanations before you cast your vote, and check back at the YoS site to see which name is finally selected.

From the SSE website:¹

The Stephen Jay Gould Prize is awarded annually by the Society for the Study of Evolution to recognize individuals whose sustained and exemplary efforts have advanced public understanding of evolutionary science and its importance in biology, education, and everyday life in the spirit of Stephen Jay Gould.

The winner of the 2009 Stephen Jay Gould Prize is Eugenie C. Scott. Dr. Scott has devoted her life to advancing public understanding of evolution. As the executive director of the National Center for Science Education she has been in the forefront of battles to ensure that public education clearly distinguishes science from non-science and that the principles of evolution are taught in all biology courses. She has served on the boards of many organizations, such as the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, and as a consultant to organizations from the National Academy of Sciences to WGBH/NOVA to the Mississippi Department of Education. In these efforts, she has been an important leader in the public sphere, molding and focusing the efforts of scientists, educators, lay people, religious groups, skeptics, agnostics, believers, scholars, and ordinary citizens through firm but gentle guidance.

Dr. Scott is a gifted communicator and public intellectual. She is a frequent guest on radio and television shows, and an eloquent spokeswoman for science. Her writings have illuminated the process of science to thousands, and her books have exposed the efforts of many groups in our society to hobble and undermine the teaching of science to our younger generation. The organization she helped create far transcends the considerable reach of her own voice, vastly amplifying her impact on public understanding. For these many reasons, it is extremely appropriate that Dr. Scott be the first recipient of the Gould Prize.

The National Center for Science Education has also posted a series of four videos on YouTube in which Genie talks about creationism, the nature of science, and the fallacy of irreducible complexity. Check them out.

In an open letter addressed to President Barack Obama and the United States Congress, twenty leading scientists and scholars assert that the currently stated objectives in limiting the climatic disruption are grossly inadequate and urge the nation's leadership to take clear leadership towards meet the objectives of the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change, steps necessary to avert a "global climatic catastrophe". (source; Woods Hole Research Center)

You can download the full PDF here.

Our climate is changing. The scientific evidence is clear: our planet is getting warmer. Greenhouse gases (GHGs) - including carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, and chlorofluorocarbons - are increasing rapidly in our atmosphere. Human activity such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation is a major source of these gases. But since we can't see them, it's easy to forget they are there. Out of sight, out of mind. And if we aren't aware of these "carbon" gases, it's easy to ignore the urgent need to reduce their emission. The Carbon Counter displays the running total amount of long-lived greenhouse gasses in the earth's atmosphere, measured in metric tons.

If you think that the Carbon Counter was put together by some environmental group, you'd be wrong. It was put together by DB Climate Change Advisors, a division of Deutsche Bank Group. They currently have approximately $4 billion under management.

Oh, if you're wondering what the total is, here's a screen capture taken at 10:44am EDT today.

The winner of the Stick Science contest sponsored by Florida Citizens for Science The winning cartoon was submitted by Richard Korzekwa from Los Alamos, NM. Click on the image for a larger version.

Open source software is widely used -- Firefox, Thunderbird, Linux, OpenOffice, etc. My sense is that computer scientists are also very open about sharing their research, posting working drafts of their research papers and often providing source code for software under the terms of an open source license (GPL, BSD, Apache, etc.).

Apparently some computer science courses don't (or didn't) reward the same behavior.

Kyle Brady, a computer science major at San Jose State University, took a course earlier this year on data structures and algorithms. After each assignment was due, he posted his code in a publicly accessible Subversion repository. His professor contacted him after the end of the semester and threatened to fail him unless he removed the code. Kyle, who is obviously bright and committed to sharing knowledge, appealed to the department head who referred it to SJSU's Office of Student Conduct and Ethical Development. Their response? Here's how Kyle describes it:

Thanks to some perseverance and asking the right questions, SJSU Professors are now prohibited from barring students from posting their code solutions online, as well as penalizing their students for doing so.

A win for students, programmers, and copyfighters nationwide!

Congratulations, Kyle! I'd be delighted if students in my courses took the time to post solutions to the problems I assign in population genetics or to share their analyses of the problems I pose in conservation biology. I agree with you that sharing knowledge makes us all better off.

In 2006 a jellyfish stung a young girl swimming in the Caribbean. She went to the hospital, and it turned out that the jellyfish is a species that has not yet been described.

Now you have a chance to name it.

All you have to do is to visit the web site sponsored by COPUS and the Year of Science 2009, read a little more about the jellyfish, and submit a name that follows the rules of zoological naming (by the 14th of June¹), and your name may be the one selected for the new species.

If you don't want to pick a name, you can check back during the week of June 17th to June 21st to vote for your favorite among the scientists' top five. After June 23rd you can check back and find out which name was selected and read the paper in which the new species is described.

But I guess I have. I just discovered that E-Books Directory lists me as the author of Population Genetics (published by the University of Connecticut in 2008). The "book" in question is a set of course notes for my graduate course in population genetics. I released the notes under a Creative Commons license precisely to allow others to re-use them, and I'm delighted to find a link to them from an e-book directory. That may help more people to find them.

A bubble in higher education:

With tuitions, fees, and room and board at dozens of colleges now reaching $50,000 a year, the ability to sustain private higher education for all but the very well-heeled is questionable. (emphasis added)

Notice the emphasis on the word "private". Public universities and colleges have much lower tuition and fees.¹ The rest of the article focuses on challenges to private institutions. Maybe Dan Drezner was right. Maybe the downturn is going to "hammer the schools with the biggest endowments." But I remain skeptical (see my comments on Dan's post).

I've been back since Wednesday afternoon, but blogging will remain light for awhile. I have my mind on other things.