One good measure of the profoundly conservative milieu in which we live is the lack of good rock n’ roll or rap songs that directly challenge religion. Maybe that’s going to change. You can find more of these at the media section of Flushaholybook.com.
The nanoHUB is a rich, web-based resource for research, education and collaboration in nanotechnology. The nanoHUB hosts over 790 resources which will help you learn about nanotechnology, including Online Presentations, Courses, Learning Modules, Podcasts, Animations, Teaching Materials, and more. Most importantly, the nanoHUB offers simulation tools which you can access from your web browser, so you can not only learn about but also simulate nanotechnology devices. The nanoHUB also provides collaboration environment via Workspaces, Online meetings and User groups.
Resources come from 396 contributors in the nanoscience community, and are used by thousands of users from over 180 countries around the world. Most of our users come from academic institutions and use nanoHUB as part of their research and educational activities. But we also have users from national labs and from industry.
About nano-HUB
I like the idea of the nanoHub and I think if I were teaching courses in nano technology or collaborating with other scientists I might find it useful. To be honest, though, it is a little intimidating simply because it is often so technical. This might suggest a kind of social limit to open science, or at least a need for a kind of ‘plain speaking’ mirror to this site, where we could go to learn more.
Perhaps one day there will be open houses at these sorts of web-labs where we can go to look over scientific knowledge as it is being made. Looking around for more information on open science, I also found The Open Science Project, “dedicated to writing and releasing free and Open Source scientific software.”
What’s interesting about this group, founded by “the open source evangelist,” Dan Gezelter, is that they see their work as, in effect, popularizing the scientific method. “We are a group of scientists, mathematicians and engineers,” they write, “who want to encourage a collaborative environment in which science can be pursued by anyone who is inspired to discover something new about the natural world.”
Here too, though, there are access issues related simply to the technical nature of the work. What, for example, is a “multiphysics finite element code system”? In all fairness, though, Gezelter does have a good sense of the non-technical too. He has a weakness, for example for the cartoon called “Medium Large.”
October 26, 2007, Paris, France – Today, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) along with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), and the French League for Human Rights filed a complaint with the Paris Prosecutor before the “Court of First Instance” (Tribunal de Grande Instance) charging former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld with ordering and authorizing torture. Rumsfeld was in Paris for a talk sponsored by Foreign Policy magazine, and left through a door connecting to the U.S. embassy to avoid journalists and human rights attorneys outside.
from the Center for Constitutional Rights Website.
I can’t listen to Democracy Now all of the time; it is too strident. Pacfica Radio, with certain exceptions, has always had a certain problem with tone. So I often stop listening for a while and then go back and listen to shows from, say, a week before. That makes the contrast between what Democracy Now sees as news and the so-called mainstream particularly sharp. This story is a good example of something that is completely below the radar, at least until one of these suits actually sticks…
The U.S. led the way into the concept of international law, from the League of Nations to the United Nations to the Geneva Convention and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Our government, of course, has a long tradition of following these laws only when it’s convenient. What is so interesting is that there is now a movement afoot to force the War criminals to face this same international justice. Rumsfield apparently slipped out of France in order to avoid press and summons. It’s a lot less quixotic than you might imagine.
So far, in fact, this seems like a well organized effort unlikely to be easily deterred. “Henry Kissinger reportedly fled Paris in 2001,” write Amy Ross and Chandra Lekha Sriram, in The Jurist , “after being tipped off to an imminent summons by a French judge; he later canceled a trip to Brazil after being warned by the government there that he might face an international arrest warrant.” Also in the sights of these suits is Guatemala’s Efrain Rios Montt, sought in connection with “the genocide of Mayan Guatemalans during his government’s scorched earth policy in the 1980s…”
The purpose of this protest is as simple as it is crucial: to confront the two Big Lies of the political left: that George Bush created the war on terror and that Global Warming is a greater danger to Americans than the terrorist threat. Nothing could be more politically incorrect than to point this out. But nothing could be more important for American students to hear. In the face of the greatest danger Americans have ever confronted, the academic left has mobilized to create sympathy for the enemy and to fight anyone who rallies Americans to defend themselves. According to the academic left, anyone who links Islamic radicalism to the war on terror is an “Islamophobe.” According to the academic left, the Islamo-fascists hate us not because we are tolerant and free, but because we are “oppressors.”
from “A Student’s Guide to Hosting Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, ” on the Terrorism Awareness Project.
Once you start reading this stuff you really feel that you have fallen down the rabbit hole. Even in strict linguistic terms it is hard to make sense of any of it. The idea is that a tactic, the use of terrorist violence, is a larger problem than a global-wide climatic disaster. The problem, too, is that these academic leftists– not the 70 plus percent of the U.S. who believe the war in Iraq should end– are forcing us all to be “politically correct.”
Even stranger, this argument is being made against all of the evidence that has piled up to explain the sources of terrorism and to suggest strategies that might do more than simply destroy a country already reeling from years of a violent dictatorship and devastating sanctions. Perhaps the whole problem is that these recent acts of violence against the U.S. have such a simple explanation that it’s just not very satisfying.
Robert Pape has made a very compelling argument based in a close examination of what terrorists claim as motivation. The American Conservative (hardly a bastion of liberalism) published an interview with him last year. “The central fact,” Pape says, “is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.”
Religion does play a role, Pape found. “When there is a religious difference between the occupier and the occupied, that enables terrorist leaders to demonize the occupier in especially vicious ways.” The U.S. occupation of land in the Middle East, then, has a doubly explosive effect. Leaving the Middle East– not just Iraq but also Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Afghanistan, among others– would not silence bin Landen, Pape says, but fewer would listen.
So these Islamo-Facists proponents are just looking for something dark and complicated to hang their paranoia on. Hyperbole is hard when the problem is just that we need to stop occupying other countries. It’s interesting to think about how far they would be willing to go with their thesis. The Old Testament, for example, argues that ‘an eye for an eye’ ought to be the ethical norm. Does that make the U.S. death penalty an example of the dominance of Christo-Facism? I guess, then, the death penalty is linked to the KKK, Timothy McVeigh, and those nuts who kill doctors and bomb clinics.
It’s also always amazing to hear that academia is full of leftists and radicals. I bet there are a lot of English and Philosophy departments who would love to think that is true but research tends to show otherwise. Socially, they put on quite a show sometimes but universities are very conservative places run by business people. What’s most frightening is that large slices of the public have apparently taken the Orwellian bait and begun to believe freedom of speech has to be quashed in order for freedom of speech to be protected.
In a review of a survey of academic political culture, (“Americans’ Views of Political Bias in the Academy and Academic Freedom“) John W. Curtis, AAUP Director of Research, worried that 65% of respondents agreed with this statement: ““Public universities should be able to dismiss professors who join radical political organizations like the communist party.” On a more positive note, about the same number agreed that professors have a right to express anti-War views in their classrooms. We’re a complicated people.