Category Archives: Podcast

Podcasts, webcasts, online video and audio on science and engineering topics.

Scientists Reconsider Autism

Webcast – In My Language – about what gets considered thought, intelligence, personhood, language, and communication, and what does not.

Scientists Reconsider What They Think They Know

This movement is being fueled by a small but growing cadre of neuropsychological researchers who are taking a fresh look at the nature of autism itself. The condition, they say, shouldn’t be thought of as a disease to be eradicated. It may be that the autistic brain is not defective but simply different — an example of the variety of human development. These researchers assert that the focus on finding a cure for autism — the disease model — has kept science from asking fundamental questions about how autistic brains function.

A cornerstone of this new approach — call it the difference model — is that past research about autistic intelligence is flawed, perhaps catastrophically so, because the instruments used to measure intelligence are bogus. “If Amanda Baggs had walked into my clinic five years ago,” says Massachusetts General Hospital neuroscientist Thomas Zeffiro, one of the leading proponents of the difference model, “I would have said she was a low-functioning autistic with significant cognitive impairment. And I would have been totally wrong.”
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And that hurts autistic people, Dawson says. She makes a comparison with blindness. Of course blind people have a disability and need special accommodation. But you wouldn’t give a blind person a test heavily dependent on vision and interpret their poor score as an accurate measure of intelligence. Mottron is unequivocal: Because of recent research, especially the Raven paper, it’s clearer than ever that so-called low-functioning people like Amanda Baggs are more intelligent than once presumed.The Dawson paper was hardly conclusive, but it generated buzz among scientists and the media. Mottron’s team is now collaborating with Massachusetts General Hospital’s Zeffiro, a neuroimaging expert, to dig deeper.

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YouTube Access Denied

Millions of users around the globe could not access YouTube for a couple hours yesterday. Why?

Well to understand, we need to start with how you normally connect to a web site. You click on a link to youtube.com. Your ISP looks up the internet address for youtube.com by looking at internet routing tables. Each domain has a name server that provides the IP address for where it should be found (for example, an IP address that shows youtube.com is 208.65.153.238).

Well what happened in this case is Pakistan decided to prevent anyone in Pakistan from accessing YouTube because the government didn’t like some video. The way Pakistan decided to accomplish this was to update their routing table to just direct all traffic that was meant to go to YouTube to a phony address which would then return nothing.

Why did many outside of Pakistan lose access to YouTube? Well their version of the routing table leaked out of Pakistan through PCCW (large internet provider), Then other internet providers adopted the incorrect information, until many around the globe were being directed to the wrong place.

You might find it amazing the routing system could allow such a thing to happen – it doesn’t seem very secure. You are right, that it doesn’t seem very sensible. When the internet was created some protocols were established that made sense then but don’t necessarily make sense for what the internet has become.

The problem was fixed when Google’s YouTube engineers contacted PCCW to inform them of the problem and have them correct it. I think if it was my site instead, I would have had difficulty figure out what was going on 🙂 Once PCCW corrected their routing tables the fixed flowed through the system and everyone was able to see the great stuff like Marissa Mayer discussing Innovation at Google.

I would imagine Internet2 (well on its way to a computer near you) and IPv6 will take not be so venerable to such a mistake.

Science Explains: Flame Color

Have you ever wondered why some flames are yellow, while others are blue? Growing up, I was always told that it was a matter of temperature, that hot flames were blue and cooler flames were yellow. While there is a temperature difference, that difference is a “symptom” of what is going on, not the cause of the color difference.
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Does that mean that there is solid stuff inside the candle flame? Let’s find out. Light the candle and be sure it is steady and won’t fall over. Hold the bottom of the plate in the candle flame for a few seconds. When you remove the plate, it has turned black!!! Don’t worry. You have not ruined it. Let it cool for a minute. Remember, it is HOT! Once it has cooled, rub your finger over the black spot. The black rubs off.

Polar Bears and Huskies

I posted about Polar Bear and Dogs previously. Now here is a video:

Water Pump Merry-go-Round

I wrote about PlayPumps in 2006: Safe Water Through Play. This video by National Geographic gives more detail on PlayPumps and water needs in general. Some facts from KnowH₂O

A child dies every 15 seconds from diseases related to unsafe water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene.

1.1 billion people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water.

40 billion hours each year are spent collecting water in sub-Saharan Africa, equal to over 19 million full-time employees.

Every $1 invested in water yields an economic return worth $8 in saved time, increased productivity and reduced healthcare costs. (UNDP)

In many areas of sub-Saharan Africa women and girls often walk an average of five miles to the nearest water source every day. If a woman only had to carry water for one hour a day, she could earn an additional US $100 a year.

BBC In Our Time Science Podcast Archive

BBC In Our Time Science Podcast Archive including: Plate Tectonics – the day the Earth moved, Genetic Mutation – the error-strewn secrets of life, The Fibonacci Sequence – the numbers in nature, Antimatter – where has it all gone?, Gravitational Waves – a new window on the universe. Great stuff. This is the type of stuff that makes the internet so great. It is wonderful the amount of great science and engineering resources are online.

Jumping Savannah Cat

The Savannah cat breed is from the mating of a male African serval cat to a female domestic cat. The serval grows to from 9 to 20 kg (20-44 lbs) and lives 12-20 years in the wild. It is closely related to the African Golden Cat and the Caracal. The cats in the webcast are Savannahs.

Science and Engineering Instructional Webcasts

doFlick offers user-generated educational, technical and instructional videos on science and engineering. Examples include: Simple Circuits – How to do a basic leak test in vacuum systems – Bacteria in the Human Mouth – Transverse Standing Waves – Pulsed Layer Deposition Overview

The site offers a short videos on science and engineering topics (plus some other topics as well). The site fills a niche that is different that any other site I have seen. The videos are largely tips on lab or engineering techniques or edited labs. These are videos that might appear on network TV but they are exactly the type of resource that makes the internet great. Lets build this resource: upload your own webcasts. There is a great advantage to short targeted online videos (compared to full course lectures – which are also great) because the short targeted videos allow for targeted linking specifically to the video content you want to link to.

This is definitely worth adding to your bookmarks. Or you can just bookmark our directory of science and engineering videos.

Science Webcasts

I have high hopes for SciVee – essentially a science focused YouTube. It has not grown as fast as I hoped it would when I first wrote about it last summer. Here is one cool short from the site:

This is a highly accurate visualization of the Bacteriophage T4 based on Cryo-EM datasets of the virus. The scope of the animation is to show the infection process of the T4 into an E. coli cell.

If you like that you will love: Inner Life of a Cell – Full Version

Some other recent SciVee videos: Where does water go when it rains? – MicrobeWorld visits The Maloy Lab at San Diego State University – Science Gateways on the TeraGrid – Six Science bloggers talk about why they blog

5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids do

5 dangerous things you should let your kids do

Gever Tulley, founder of the Tinkering School, talks about our new wave of overprotected kids — and spells out 5 (and really, he’s got 6) dangerous things you should let your kids do. Allowing kids the freedom to explore, he says, will make them stronger and smarter and actually safer.

It is not necessarily the safest thing to try and eliminate all risks. Kids can learn to be safer when they work on not entirely safe things with parents or others that can teach them how to do so safely. And they learn to interact with the world around them and think like a scientist.