Physical Sciences
purepedantry | July 31, 2008Sorry for the light blogging everyone. It has been a busy, busy week.
Some of you may have caught Janet Hyde's latest paper looking at data from the No Child Left Behind Act and math performance in the US. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, states are required to test children for a variety of skills on a yearly basis. The paper looked at math performance across grade-level broken down by gender for 10 states from these tests.
Here is the key graph:
The data includes a measure of effect size called Cohen's d (I discussed it here) and a measure called the variance ratio (VR -- which is…
razib | July 27, 2008Chad has a post up The Innumeracy of Intellectuals, where he goes on a rant against humanities academics and their blithe complacency in relation to their ignorance of science & mathematics. Two points....
1) One of the major issues with humanistically oriented intellectuals, I believe, is a lack of anthropological fluency with the culture of science. As a case in point, a contributor to the literary weblog The Valve dismissed my assertion that scholars who study science should have some immersion in scientific education at some point with the quip that experience with multiple choice…
drorzel | July 27, 2008Richard Reeves is probably best known for writing biographies of American Presidents (Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan), so it's a little strange to see him turn his hand to scientific biography. This is part of Norton's "Great Discoveries" series (which inexplicably lacks a web page-- get with the 21st century, already), though, so incongruous author-subject pairing is part of the point.
Some time back, there was a "meme" that went through the science side of blogdom asking people to post about their favorite historical scientist. I didn't contribute, mostly because I didn't really have a favorite…
drorzel | July 24, 2008
Study: No gender differences in math performance
"Whether they looked at average performance, the scores of the most gifted children or students' ability to solve complex math problems, girls measured up to boys."
(tags: gender math education social-science news society)
Kids Say The Darndest Things To Evil Spirits | The A.V. Club
"[T]here comes a point when we as a society have to ask ourselves where we went wrong. Why do our movie-children insist on being conduits for evil?"
(tags: movies silly)
Backreaction: Liquid Helium
A tribute in honor of the 100th anniversary of the…
jlynch | July 24, 2008(Another book review, this time from 2002 and the Journal of the History of Biology. Both books are still in print and worth reading)
The simplicity (and adversarial nature) of the phrase "science versus religion" belies the diversity of ways in which these two fields of knowledge can, and do, interact. Thanks to the work of Ian Barbour, four modes of interaction are now generally accepted (conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration). It has been realized that in these post-1859 times, religion has had to face the radical reconfiguration of the human experience that appears to be…
aardvarchaeology | July 23, 2008A Trondheim colleague has kindly invited me to head a session at the Nordic TAG conference next May. T.A.G. means "Theoretical Archaeology Group", and denotes a series of annual conferences rather than a defined group of people. The invitation hinted that I might perhaps want to contribute something provocative. After a moment's thought, I realised that my attitude to TAG (Nordic or otherwise) goes beyond provocative: I am simply hostile to it. Archaeological theory, in my opinion, belongs within the context of real specific archaeological research and is useless in an abstract form, which…
neurophilosophy | July 22, 2008
While wandering around looking at the outreach activities at ESOF2008, I came across this interesting booth for the PS3GRID project, by members of the Multiscale Lab, which is located in the University of Pompeu Fabra's Computational Biochemistry and Biophysics Laboratory at the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park.
Run by volunteers, the project involves building computer simulations of molecules to study protein dynamics and interactions. This is done using gaming hardware such as the PlayStation 3 and NVIDIA graphics card, which have more processing power than the CPUs found in standard…
terrasig | July 21, 2008I was originally going to let this one lie since I was so late to the game: Jacob Goldstein at WSJ's Health Blog picked up on a recent NEJM perspective paper by Harvard Medical School Dean for Medical Education, Jules L Dienstag, MD, describing the need and justification for re-examining the pre-med curriculum. In the article, Dienstag notes that the current requirement of 1 year of biology, 2 years of chemistry (including organic chemistry), 1 year of physics and, in some cases, 1 year of mathematics, might be out of touch with today's required focus on human biology.
Dienstag notes:…
gregladen | July 20, 2008It turns out that when you get up close and have a look around, there is a pile of evidence on Mars suggesting that the Angry Red Planet used to be the Disgruntled Wet Planet. Have a look at this photo of an unambiguous delta sitting in a crater.
A color-enhanced image of the delta in Jezero Crater, which once held a lake. Researchers led by CRISM team member and Brown graduate student Bethany Ehlmann report that ancient rivers ferried clay-like minerals (shown in green) into the lake, forming the delta. Clays tend to trap and preserve organic matter, making the delta a good place to look…
drorzel | July 17, 2008
Kieran Healy's Weblog - Elementary Particles
"Particle physics has been in the doldrums a bit lately, so they could do with some interdisciplinary reinvigoration. Also, their research budgets remain quite large."
(tags: social-science silly physics blogs)
Crooked Timber » » Necrotrends: The GOP Was The Party of Civil Rights
"So long as political considerations are divorced from concerns about biological vivification, the possibilities are endless."
(tags: politics silly stupid US)
Electron microscope sees single hydrogen atoms - physicsworld.com
"The team has also been able to watch…
drorzel | July 11, 2008Matt at Built On Facts spots an Inside Higher Ed article that I missed, showing that grad students at South Carolina get $9,500 a year, and uses it as a starting point to comment about grad school salaries:
The difficulty of living as a graduate student varies heavily on what you're studying. Take at the law school model, for instance: you don't get paid at all, and tuition is very expensive and not waived. But the upside to that is that you're not in school very long, you can live comfortably on loans, and once out you can probably get a high-paying job which can pay down your debt fairly…
clock | July 10, 2008Do We Think That Machines Can Think?:
When our PC goes on strike again we tend to curse it as if it was a human. The question of why and under what circumstances we attribute human-like properties to machines and how such processes manifest on a cortical level was investigated in a project led by Dr. Sören Krach and Prof. Tilo Kircher from the RWTH Aachen University (Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy) in cooperation with the Department of "Social Robotics" (Bielefeld University) and the Neuroimage Nord (Hamburg).
Surveying German Subs Sunk Off North Carolina During World War II:
NOAA…
laelaps | July 6, 2008
A clip from the Nature documentary "Murder in the Troop."
Before June of last year I didn't particularly like baboons. They seemed to be aggressive, ill-tempered monkeys that more often provoked a small sense of revulsion in me than curiosity. (In fact, for most of my life I thought primates were pretty boring; didn't they just sit around eating leaves and picking ticks off each other?) Then I happened to pick up Robert Sapolsky's A Primate's Memoir and that all changed. There was so much I didn't know about them and by the time I put down Sapolsky's book I had an interest and affection…
purepedantry | June 27, 2008There is a must-read paper in Nature about the limits of functional MRI as an experimental tool by one of its pioneers, Nikos Logothetis. (Also discussed by Jonah and Vaughan.)
This paper is pretty technical, but Logothetis hits the important points of what it is we think we are actually measuring using the fMRI. Also, he notes that the difficulty in interpreting fMRI data lies in the fact that you have to make assumptions about network architecture that may or may not be true. Other experiments are required to confirm the validity of these assumptions.
Here is his good summary of the…
jrosenhouse | June 25, 2008Theistic evolutionists have a bumper crop of books to choose from this summer. I've already reviewed Ken Miller's new book Only a Theory. Michael Dowd's Thank God for Evolution! is on deck in my “To Read” pile. The subject for today, however, is Karl Giberson's Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution. Giberson is a professor of physics at Eastern Nazarene College.
The curious thing about the book is that Giberson actually says very little about how to be both a Christian and an evolutionist. Most of the book is given over to covering the standard topics in this area…
ksharpe | June 25, 2008These are the stories that defined the past week at our European partner site, ScienceBlogs.de:
European Soccer Games
Not surprisingly, the 2008 European Football Championship is still topic number one in Europe. The ScienceBloggers are always on the lookout for new scientific studies about soccer. For instance, Frank Abel writes about finding that the temperature has a decisive influence on who will win a game. This is the result of an analysis of external factors such as wind, rain and temperatures. He writes, "the German national team needs to play around 73 Fahrenheit and weak winds for…
greengabbro | June 18, 2008A reader named Amanda recently wrote me, asking for some advice:
I graduated from NYU in 2007 and have been working in LA as an assistant, but I'm thinking about going back to college and getting a second degree. My first one is a BFA in screenwriting, so naturally I want to compliment that with a BS in geology in order to be a high school science teacher. Here's the thing: as obsessed as I am with geology, I'm terrified of actually studying it. I'm great with concepts, and applying things I've studied to real life.
Problem is, I'm terrrible at any level of math higher than algebra. Because…
clock | June 17, 2008First Successful Reverse Vasectomy On Endangered Species Performed At The National Zoo:
Veterinarians at the Smithsonian's National Zoo performed the first successful reverse vasectomy on a Przewalski's horse (E. ferus przewalskii; E. caballus przewalskii--classification debated), pronounced zshah-VAL-skeez. Przewalksi's horses are a horse species native to China and Mongolia that was declared extinct in the wild in 1970.
Lizards Pull A Wheelie:
Why bother running on hind legs when the four you've been given work perfectly well? This is the question that puzzles Christofer Clemente. For birds…
gregladen | June 16, 2008I have not read this book, but I'm interested in finding out more about it. Has anyone out there had a shot at it?
Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity (Sather Classical Lectures)
Information from Amazon.com: Review
"Sedley's argument is subtle and expert. . . . The brilliance of this book is that Sedley lets the Greeks talk to us and, surprisingly, we can understand what they're saying."--Nature
Product Description
The world is configured in ways that seem systematically hospitable to life forms, especially the human race. Is this the outcome of divine planning or simply of the…
gregladen | June 13, 2008 "We are going to visit a living, breathing star for the first time," says program scientist Lika Guhathakurta of NASA Headquarters. "This is an unexplored region of the solar system and the possibilities for discovery are off the charts." The best job you'll ever love! Travel! Excitement! Join NASA on an amazing new venture. A trip of a life time.
To where you ask?
Why, THE SUN, of course!
The mission will be called Solar Probe+. Launch may happen as early as 2015.
Solar Probe will be a historic mission, flying into one of the last unexplored regions of the solar system, the…