* Don't forget to put in your nominations for the Cliopatria Awards, or at least be thinking of possible nominees. The clock is ticking.
* When I was considering AOCs in graduate school I originally intended to philosophy of science; but I found that the sorts of things that I was interested in -- the complexities of diffusion of scientific information (scientific pedagogy and popularization), Duhem, Whewell, etc. -- were rarely studied, and the things that were usually studied were often exactly the things I thought utterly pointless dead ends. So that ended that. But I still have an interest in the diffusion of scientific information, and keep an eye out for people asking the right questions and trying to give good answers to them. I still think we need good answers to questions about the best way for scientific information to be brought to the general public. Larry Moran at "Sandwalk" has a habit of asking good questions, and he recently asked a question on precisely this subject, using an example at YouTube.
* E. David Ford and Hiroaki Ishii, The Method of Synthesis in Ecology (PDF)
The SEP article on Ecology
Colyvan, et al. A Field Guide to Philosophy of Ecology (PDF)
* Richard Howe's Thomistic Responses to Some Objections to Aquinas's Second Way (PDF) (ht)
* Well, I have to hand it to Huckabee; he at least has a decent sense of humor. It will fly over some people's heads, but it manages to be both enjoyable and memorable, which is a good target to aim for in a political ad. The big test for any TV advertisement is whether it could stand out during the Super Bowl; and this is the closest any political ad is likely to come.
* Duck has some criticism of D'Souza.
* Carnivalesque XXXIII is up at Blogenspiel.
* A NYT article on the decline of tenure (ht). Even if colleges increase their tenure-track positions, there would still be the real problem that colleges keep hiring adjuncts that they do not support properly; increasing tenure-track positions will not change the fact that people who are hired as adjuncts will face much the same conditions they do now. And when budget is tight in the future, the number of adjuncts will swing up again, and there will still be nothing in place to support the adjunct pool properly. No one expects adjunctsto have the level of departmental and administrative support that full professors have, due to the fact that they have rather different, and definitely supplementary, roles in the department, but they do have the right to expect to be treated as real professors rather than as glorified substitute teachers or the academic equivalent of day labor. They are real professors supplementing the department, to be sure; but professors for all that. They should be supported as such.
* There has been some fuss over the recent stem cell breakthrough. It is perhaps worth pointing out that everyone seems to agree that the breakthrough has more to do with understanding how cells work than with creating useful stem cells; the method used is not suitable for clinical applications. Nick Anthis has an overview and some links for further information.
* Ed Cook has a post on T.E. Lawrence and C.S. Lewis.
* Ars Moriendi at "The Lion and the Cardinal"
* J. T. Paasch has some translations of late medieval Trinitarian theology.
