Legacy of racist US housing policies extends even to bird data
"....Ellis-Soto and his team studied bird sightings in more than 9,000 neighbourhoods, covering almost 200 US cities....
“You can better predict where you have data on birds based on systemic racism — redlining maps from 1933 — than climate, tree cover or population density, everything a bird should actually care about” #EnvironmentalStudies#EnvHist#HistSTM#Biodiversity#Sociology https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02825-w
For #SciArtSeptember day 9: heart, it’s trailblazing American #biochemist Marie Maynard Daly (1921-2003), 1st Black woman to earn a PhD in #chemistry in the US! She made important research contributions to the biochemisty of the cell nucleus & cardiovascular issues & our knowledge of the chemistry of histones & protein synthesis. She published original research establishing that….
For #SciArtSeptember Day 7: indigo a little story of analogy & bias in the most famous physicist of all. My lino block print is inspired by the earliest colour wheel, made by Isaac Newton. When he first split white light in 1665 into the rainbow spectrum of colours, he named & described what he saw as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet (often denoted ROY G BIV).
SIgCIS is the #ACM special interest group in Computing, Information, and Society. They did a good thing by planning to have an online meeting every other year, so this is that year and please do support the event so it continues.
Good Morning! On this day, (Wednesday) August 30 in 1797 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born. She was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; which is considered an early example of science fiction. She also edited and promoted the works of her husband Percy
Good Morning! On this day, (Tuesday) August 29 in 1924 Dinah Washington was born. She was an American singer and pianist, one of the most popular black female recording artists of the 1950s. Primarily a jazz vocalist, she performed and recorded in a wide variety of styles.
I'm reading Charles Darwin's barnacle study with a queer eye with a mind towards developing my 2021 article 'Darwin's Closet' . . . but, doing a bit of googling around it, I find that someone on Reddit has already beat me to the core thesis . . . 🤨
Happy birthday to mathematician & NASA scientist Katherine Johnson (née Coleman; 1918 – 2020). One of the first Black women employed as a NASA scientist (and its predecessor NACA), she was known for her mastery of complex manual calculations of orbital mechanics and played a pivotal role in the success of the US crewed spaceflights from the beginning.
Good Morning! On this day, (Saturday) August 26 in 1892 Elizebeth Friedman was born. She was an American expert cryptanalyst and author who deciphered enemy codes in both World Wars and helped solve international smuggling cases during Prohibition.
Good Morning! On this day, (Mon) August 21 in 1874 Eleanor Davies-Colley was born. She was a British surgeon. Among the earliest women in the UK to pursue a career in surgery, at that time an almost entirely male-dominated profession, she was also the co-founder of a hospital.
My 2021 article 'Darwin's Closet: The Queer Sides of The Descent of Man (1871)' in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society has now been viewed over 20K times! Please keep sharing: https://academic.oup.com/zoolinnean/article/191/2/323/6075648 🏳️🌈 🐒
🎂 A delightful birthday treat today, visiting Down House - former home of Charles Darwin - for the first time. This was long overdue!
Amid all the staid Victoriana, I couldn't help but think of Darwin writing about gynandromorphs, 'latent sex,' 'vice,' and 'extreme sensuality' here . . .
Two male Asian elephants, Dunk and Gold Dust, were star attractions at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. In November 1892 physician Irving C. Rosse described, somewhat disapprovingly, how the animals had sex together, this being the first published account of same-sex sexual behaviour in elephants. 🏳️🌈 🐘
Happy birthday to #geologist & oceanographic #cartographer Marie Tharp (1920-2006), whose pioneering, thorough & complete ocean floor maps with Bruce Heezen, made using realms of echo sounder data, revealed the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
After studying #geology & math, Maurice 'Doc' Ewing at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia hired her to draft 1000s of echo sounder profiles. Women were still not allowed to participate in
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Happy birthday Rosalind Franklin (1920 – 1958), #chemist & x-ray #crystallographer whose x-ray diffraction images were instrumental to discovering double-helix structure of #DNA, made important contributions to #carbon & #virus research, was 1 of the great scientists of the 20th century.
There's a joke amongst scientists that goes, "What did Watson and Crick discover?" "Rosalind Franklin's notes." But there’s more to the story.
Happy birthday to #astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell! In 1967, she was a grad student when she discovered the 1st radio pulsar, a highly magnetized, rotating neutron star that emits a beam of EM radiation. This radiation can only be observed when the star is pointed towards us; so, like the light from a lighthouse, it appears to pulse at a precise frequency. She had been working with her supervisor Hewish & others to construct a radio telescope to #MastoArt#linocut#printmaking#histstm
Happy birthday to American #astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868-1921) who set the scale of our Universe. In her day, women scientists were regularly hired to do menial chores like counting images on photographic plates as a "computer". In studying these plates, in 1908 she was able to deduce a ground-breaking theory, which allowed Hubble's later insight about the age and expansion of the universe.
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Happy birthday to trailblazing American computer scientist Frances Elizabeth Allen (1932 – 2020) who made foundational contributions to optimizing compilers, optimizing programs and parallel computing. She was the first woman to become an IBM Fellow, where she worked from 1957 to 2002 and as an emeritus fellow afterwards. She was the first woman to win the Turing Prize.
Happy birthday to #physicist Harriet Brooks (1876 - 1933) who discovered atomic recoil, Radon & recognized radioactive elements could undergo chains of transmutations into a series of new elements. #nuclear#physics
She was Rutherford’s 1st grad student at McGill. After publishing her results in 1899 she completed her MSc in 1901 on "Damping of Electrical Oscillations," before embarking on #radioactivity research.
Good Morning! On this day, (Sunday) June 18 in 1913 Sylvia Field Porter was born. She was an American economist, journalist and author. At the height of her career, her readership was greater than 40 million people.