Physical Sciences
jlynch | June 10, 2008Razib presents some interesting data on donations to the two main political parties by scientists. What struck me is that if you rank the professions from most Republican to most Democrat, you get the following:
Civil Engineering [0.75]
Chemical Engineering [0.79]
Geology [0.92]
Mechanical Engineering [0.96]
Electrical Engineering [1.17]
Chemistry [2.31]
Biochemistry [5.09]
Mathematics [5.44]
Physics [6.19]
Biology [10.3]
Now what I find interesting here is that if we use the Discovery Institute's 2007 list of 700 Dissenters against Darwinism, we see that the top five groups represented are…
jlynch | June 10, 2008Two quick shots ...
Firstly, ASU is planning to install a 2 megawatt roof-top solar grid that will provide over 20% of the power to our campus. The installation is expected to be completed by the end of the year.
That’s enough to run 4,600 computers and reduce carbon emissions by 2,825 tons per year, or the equivalent of taking 530 cars off the road for a year. Long-term plans call for up to 7 megawatts of solar-generating capacity to be built at ASU in Tempe, with additional solar installations at its campuses in downtown Phoenix and other locations.
Secondly, Lawrence Krauss (of The…
laelaps | June 9, 2008In a very interesting post about agamids and chameleons at Tetrapod Zoology, my fellow ScienceBlogger Darren states the following;
One of the greatest fallacies held about evolutionary theory is that fossils are essential in demonstrating the existence of change (don't believe me? Look at 'creation science' books like Duane Gish's Evolution: the Challenge of the Fossil Record and Evolution: the Fossils Say No!). Of course fossils do indeed show how characters were accrued and modified over time, and it's that 'time' aspect of the data that they shed crucial information on. But we most…
laelaps | June 3, 2008
Jennifer Ouellette is disappointed with the conspicuous lack of science books at Book Expo America. Is science being "put in the corner"?
The brothers Bleiman have an old NSF ad that brings back some memories. Now I'm going to have that tune stuck in my head all day.
Many of us science bloggers (myself included) spend a lot of time complaining that mass media is the suxxors when it comes to science communication. Bora has a few snippets from a study that might suggest that accurate reporting of science stories in mainstream outlets might not be as much of a problem as we say they…
oracknows | June 1, 2008In the nearly two years of its existence, I have strived to feature only the finest and most outrageous woo that I can find. It's mostly been medical quackery but sometimes it's other topics as well. Oddly enough, the vast majority of the woo featured nearly every week never attracts the attention of any regulatory bodies. Given the hilariously, extravagantly pseudscientific or spiritual claims made to support some of these devices, it's hard to image how so many of them never attract the loving attention of the Food and Drug Administration or the counterpart of the FDA in other countries in…
evolvingthoughts | May 30, 2008
I have for a long time now been very dissatisfied with the metaphysical categories bequeathed to us from Aristotle via a multitude of commentators and philosophers ranging from Boethius to Ockham to Locke to Hume to Kant. It seems to me that they are based on a prescientific notion of what sorts of things exist. In particular, the notion of substance strikes me as questionable: it is based rather explicitly on the distinction between the clay a potter uses and the properties of a particular piece of pottery. By starting with a human-centric activity, Aristotle inverted the way things are:…
oracknows | May 28, 2008I sometimes wonder if the world is laughing at me.
Let me explain. A while ago I compiled a list of academic medical institutions that--shall we say?--are far more receptive to pseudoscientific and downright unscientific medicine in the form of so-called complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), otherwise known as "integrative medicine." I dubbed this list my Academic Woo Aggregator, and lamented how big it was with much wailing and gnashing of skeptical teeth. Indeed, more than once I have reluctantly concluded that woo is fast becoming the future of American medicine. High up on the…
clock | May 22, 2008
If you are one of the few of my readers who actually slogged through my Clock Tutorials, especially the difficult series on Entrainment and Phase Response Curves, you got to appreciate the usefulness of the oscillator theory from physics in its application to the study of biological clocks. Use of physics models in the study of biological rhythms, pioneered by Colin Pittendrigh, is an immensely useful tool in the understanding of the process of entrainment to environmental cycles.
Yet, as I warned several times, a Clock is a metaphor and, as such, has to be treated with thought and caution…
purepedantry | May 20, 2008Daniel Drezner links to two articles with alternative interpretations to the gender gap in science. Both are looking at a female exodus from hard sciences, but explain it in different ways. First, Lisa Belkin in the NYTimes takes the angle of institutionalized discrimination and a macho male culture:
Based on data from 2,493 workers (1,493 women and 1,000 men) polled from March 2006 through October 2007 and hundreds more interviewed in focus groups, the report paints a portrait of a macho culture where women are very much outsiders, and where those who do enter are likely to eventually…
laelaps | May 19, 2008
Last month I posted an interview with paleontologist Bob Bakker, and while the scientific questions I asked stirred some discussion (including a response to some of the points from Jack Horner) a number of readers got hung up on the last part of the interview dealing with science & religion. Many of the comments on the original post disagreed with Bakker's criticism of Richard Dawkins, while creationists elsewhere on the web quote-mined the interview to support of their own views (see here and here, for example).
Just this past weekend Bakker sent me a reply to the comments that centered…
razib | May 19, 2008Sheril and other science bloggers are talking about the fact that the top 3 in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair are female. I suppose that means we'll stop talking about gender disparities in science & engineering? Yeah, I doubt it....
At the same time, this just popped into my RSS, The freedom to say 'no': Why aren't there more women in science and engineering? Controversial new research suggests: They just aren't interested:
They have a provocative echo in the conclusions of Susan Pinker, a psychologist and columnist for the Toronto Globe and Mail. In her…
drorzel | May 16, 2008
World Science Festival Blog
Of course they have a blog-- it's 2008, for God's sake...
(tags: blogs science society culture education theater television movies art physics biology chemistry environment)
Pharmaceuticals in the Environment, Information for Assessing Risk » Home
"The database provides information on prescribed amounts, levels detected in aquatic environments, chemical structure, molecular weight, octanol-water partition coefficients, water solubility, environmental persistence, general toxicity information and sp
(tags: science environment chemistry medicine drugs)…
oracknows | May 16, 2008This week was difficult.
No, it wasn't difficult because I had hit one of my periodic woo writer's blocks that I whine about, no doubt to the occasional annoyance of my readers, even though I have one of the greatest hobbies in the world. I mean, I get to do something that I love (writing and blogging) and even get paid a nominal sum for doing it. Even better, this whole Respectful Insolence⢠thing has grown far beyond my wildest imaginings when more than three years ago, on winter's day in a deep and dark December, I experimented with Blogger on a whim and created the first incarnation of…
drorzel | May 15, 2008
Learning Curves: Verizon Wireless Reminds You to Silence Your Cell Phone During Class
"I'm willing to put corporate logos on my PowerPoint slides if the Math Department gets to keep a decent share of the ad revenue. "
(tags: academia education economics math silly)
Pre-K students benefit when teachers are supportive
Today's news from the Journal of Well, Duh.
(tags: academia education psychology news society culture)
Adolescents' values can serve as a buffer against behaving violently at school
Another shocker.
(tags: academia education psychology news science social-science society…
cortex | May 14, 2008I admire David Brooks for trying to expand the list of topics written about by Times columnists. (To be honest, I'm a little tired of reading about presidential politics.) His latest column, on "The Neural Buddhists," tries to interject modern neuroscience into the current debate over New Atheists and religion.
Lo and behold, over the past decade, a new group of assertive atheists has done battle with defenders of faith. The two sides have argued about whether it is reasonable to conceive of a soul that survives the death of the body and about whether understanding the brain explains away or…
drorzel | May 9, 2008Timothy Burke has some interesting thoughts about the College of the Atlantic, which represents a real effort to build interdisciplinarity on an institutional level. "Interdisciplinary" is the buzzword of the moment in large swathes of academia, and the College of the Atlantic, which doesn't have departments and works very hard to make connections between disciplines, is sort of the apotheosis of the interdisciplinary movement.
Toward the end of his post, Burke relates a story from earlier in his career:
When I was briefly at Emory at the start of my career, I was in a workshop on…
oracknows | May 9, 2008Last week's woo was pretty darned hard to top, don't you think? It had it all, after all: Boner potentiation, penis enlargement, magnets, near infrared, and more. The only thing it lacked that would have made it absolutely perfect woo were references to pseudoscientific "vibration" or, even better, quantum theory. That's the reason I could only give it a 9.5/10 rather than a perfect score of 10/10. All I can say is: Better luck next time.
In looking for something that could at least live up to last week, if not surpass it, I was surprised that there actually was such a link in my ever-…
esiegel | May 7, 2008The American Association of Physics Teachers just published a study of 1,000 likely U.S. voters about science, religion, evolution, and creationism. The results are frightening. Here are some of the "highlights" of their study:
38% of Americans are in favor of the teaching of religion in public school science classrooms.
65% of Americans do not think that it is an important science goal to understand the origin and diversity of biological life on Earth.
47% of Americans believe that the earliest humans lived at the same time as the dinosaurs.
21% of Americans do not believe that the…
purepedantry | May 5, 2008Happy Cinco de Mayo everyone! Down with that imperialist aggressor Napoleon III! (The painting to the right is Manet's Execution of Maximillian. Supposedly, the chap on the right looks like Napoleon III, in a zinger to his administration which Manet viewed as responsible for Maximillian's death.)
Cosmic Variance has a great post on the physics of chocolate and why it doesn't always solidify the way you want it to:
If you've ever tried to use chocolate in its melted form, you've probably discovered that chocolate has a number of peculiarities that frequently thwart your best culinary…
grrlscientist | May 2, 2008tags: Elizabeth Blackburn, Joan Steitz, Albany Medical Center Prize
I learned this afternoon that America's highest prize in medicine, the Albany Medical Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research, was awarded to two women for the first time in its history. The recipients, Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco, and Joan Steitz of Yale University will share the $500,000 prize, which is second only to the $1.4 million Nobel Prize. The two medical scientists, who work independently of each other, study proteins associated with DNA and RNA, and their work will likely…