Social Sciences
drorzel | July 22, 2011The final Space Shuttle landed the other day, leading to much lamentation over the end of the program, all over the Internet. It was absolutely choking my Twitter feeds for a while, which is mostly what I was thinking about when I re-tweeted this snide comment from Robert Lamb (though, to be fair, most of the people choking my Twitter feeds with Shuttle-related comments are space obsessives anyway, so it's not that new). I got a little grief for that over in locked LiveJournal land, so I thought I might as well say a bit more about it here.
While there is some part of me that feels a little…
drorzel | July 22, 2011
If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault - Anil Dash
"As it turns out, we have a way to prevent gangs of humans from acting like savage packs of animals. In fact, we've developed entire disciplines based around this goal over thousands of years. We just ignore most of the lessons that have been learned when we create our communities online. But, by simply learning from disciplines like urban planning, zoning regulations, crowd control, effective and humane policing, and the simple practices it takes to stage an effective public event, we can come up with a set of principles to…
lborkowski | July 21, 2011This post is part of the Birth Control Blog Carnival put on by the National Women's Law Center.
Yesterday I wrote about new Institute of Medicine recommendations regarding preventive health services for women that should be covered by all new health plans without requiring cost-sharing. One of the IOM's recommendations was that all FDA-approved contraceptive methods be available free of charge to women with reproductive capacity, and this was the one that attracted the most opposition. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 99% of women who've had sexual intercourse have used contraception.…
pharyngula | July 20, 2011Last week, the Cloyne report was released. This document describes patterns of child abuse and in particular the willful intransigence of the Catholic church in correcting the problems in Ireland, and it's pretty damned damning. One significant detail: the Church's defense in recent months consists of claiming priestly pedophilia was a thing of the past, a product of the laxity and corruption of the general social atmosphere in the 60s and 70s, pushing the blame onto that awful liberal culture, not the church. Unfortunately, the Cloyne report assesses policies in the late 1990s, so we're…
drorzel | July 20, 2011
The Strategic Plan: Neither Strategy Nor Plan, but a Waste of Time - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education
"This interchangeability of visions for the future underscores the fact that the precise content of most colleges' strategic plans is pretty much irrelevant. Plans are usually forgotten soon after they are promulgated. My university has presented two systemwide strategic plans and one arts-and-sciences strategic plan in the past 15 years. No one can remember much about any of those plans, but another one is in the works. The plan is not a blueprint for the future. It is,…
jtoney | July 19, 2011
Source.
What ever happened to Prof. Al-Singace, a Bahraini enginner who "was taken forcibly from his home on March 17th and imprisoned without charge"?
I have an update received today from Scholars at Risk as a follow up to my earlier post.
The military Judge's choice of rescheduling his appeal for September 11 is curious. I am not offering a legal opinion and am not familiar with this particular case; I am simply advocating for due process protected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
From Scholars at Risk:
Professor…
jtoney | July 19, 2011The Universal Periodic Review "has great potential to promote and protect human rights in the darkest corners of the world." - Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary-General
Should nations open themselves up to scrutiny by the United Nations? The Universal Periodic Review, adopted in 2006, takes a very close look at how nations fare in a broad range of areas such as civil rights, immigration and respect for basic human rights.
The United States participated in this review, with the goal of establishing a model for other nations. Surprisingly, the United States fared far worse on this "humanity…
drorzel | July 14, 2011
Jamie Leigh Jones verdict: Jury trials aren't always satisfying, but they're better than angry mobs. - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine
As Alan Dershowitz explained last week: "A criminal trial is never about seeking justice for the victim. If it were, there could be only one verdict: guilty. That's because only one person is on trial in a criminal case, and if that one person is acquitted, then by definition there can be no justice for the victim in that trial." If all that sounds cold, lawyerly, and inhuman, that's because the justice system is designed to be all those things. Juries…
tfk | July 7, 2011About a year ago, a month before our wedding, I was walking with my wife (wife-to-be, I guess) and some friends through New York City. It was a hot, sunny summer day, so she was in a sun dress.
We walked through parks, we met various friends throughout the city, and generally had a good time.
That evening, talking with her mom, she mentioned that she needed to pin the front of her dress, because it showed too much cleavage, and people had been staring at her cleavage whispering crude things to her all day.
Folks, I was right there, arm around her waist, pretty much all day. But jackasses…
drorzel | July 5, 2011
Performance and Recording: "Everyone sing the chorus--including intellectuals!" -- Crooked Timber
"I just read two books back to back to good effect: Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy and Elijah Wald's How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music [...]
Ong's book is a classic. Out of date in some ways (published in 1982), but still worth a read for the way it stakes out a para-McLuhanite position on the orality-literacy debate. Wald's book came out a couple years ago and is a real eye/ear-opener (I'll let my kids decide whether it's a classic, when…
oracknows | July 4, 2011I saw this story on Friday and almost couldn't wait the weekend to blog about it. However, since the conference that was brought to my attention isn't until November, I ultimately decided that it would keep. At least until now.
This story is about Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health. Unlike some bloggers, personally, as a physician and scientist I don't much care about what religion Dr. Collins ascribes to. Unlike some writers such as Sam Harris, most definitely do not consider his strong Christian faith a disqualification for holding the position that he now…
aardvarchaeology | June 29, 2011Here's a piece of radical Libertarian politics for you. The Confederation of Swedish Enterprise, Svenskt Näringsliv, is a respectable mainstream employers' organisation. Their people have identified a problem with the Swedish university system, viz, that unemployed people are entering undergraduate programs that do not actually make them employable. The Confederation points out the Humanities specifically. And they suggest a solution: students in these programs should not receive the same amount of study loans as other students.
I agree that the problem exists, but not with the suggested…
sastyk | June 27, 2011As I gear up to finish my Adapting-in-Place book, I've been thinking a lot about the role of the informal economy in supporting a culture that can't keep growing and consuming resources at the same rate. As those of you who have been following my work for a while know, the informal economy represents the larger portion of the world economy (3/4 of all economic activity) and includes a wide range of important activities. When the formal economy fails, the informal economy is needed - and yet we have stripped the informal economy over the last decades. How to rebuild is a huge question - and…
tsmith | June 23, 2011I have written and deleted this post. Twice. But damn it, it needs to be said.
I'm here in charming Montreal for the North American Congress of Epidemiology. It's a good-sized meeting, as far as epi meetings go. The site notes that it's a joint effort between four major Epi organizations: The American College of Epidemiology (ACE); The Society for Epidemiologic Research; the Epi section of the American Public Health Association, and The Canadian Society for Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Collectively, those associations represent a lot of epidemiologists.
The conference started off well.…
pharyngula | June 16, 2011Don't be surprised, though. It's only natural.
Now consider human males. No doubt you have noticed an alarming trend in the news. Powerful men have been behaving badly, e.g. tweeting, raping, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world. The current view of such things is that the men are to blame for their own bad behavior. That seems right. Obviously we shouldn't blame the victims. I think we all agree on that point. Blame and shame are society's tools for keeping things under control.
The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that…
tetrapodzoology | June 15, 2011Here's something you don't see very often...
This illustration (by Peter Trusler) shows the large Pleistocene Cuban owl Ornimegalonyx oteroi battling with a solenodon. Ornimegalonyx has been mentioned here a few times before (use the search bar), but nothing substantive, sorry. Most sources mention O. oteroi as if it's the only named species of Ornimegalonyx. Actually, Arredondo (1982) named three additional ones: O. minor, O. gigas and O. acevedoi. And, by the way, the Ornimegalonyx owls weren't the only big owls on Pleistocene Cuba - there was also a particularly big eagle owl (Bubo…
aardvarchaeology | June 14, 2011Current Archaeology #254 (May) has a pretty funny 6-page feature by Spencer Smith of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales. He claims to have found the site of a Surrey manor house that saw the birth of the last Prince of Wales who was actually an independent Welsh prince: Owain Lawgoch, Owain of the Red Hand (b. c. 1330, d. 1378). But reading the article, I found that it is actually a long piece of special pleading to explain why Smith did not find the desired remains on site! The whole thing was prompted by a TV documentary, where of course you have to put a…
pharyngula | June 14, 2011Not again. Oh, no, not again. It's more garbage from the Journal of Cosmology, with an article titled Sexual Consciousness: The Evolution of Breasts, Buttocks and the Big Brain. Hang on a moment before you click to rush over there, though. Here's the abstract:
As first proposed and detailed by Joseph (1992a, 1993, 1996, 2000a,b), the evolution of human consciousness is directly related to the evolution of human female sexuality and full time sexual availability signaled by the evolution of a permanent enlargement of the female breasts and buttocks thereby mimicking the signs of estrus in…
sastyk | June 10, 2011In thousands of ways, UN policy helps shape how we respond to emerging crises, from basic poverty to world political events, from food to climate change and population. What is emerging, however, is that UN analyses are increasingly diverging from reality - as they attempt to describe our future, they have failed to adequately (or at all) take into account that most basic of all considerations, material limits on energy resources.
The UN is one of the most powerful organizations in the world influencing international policy - the IPCC, the Populaton Council, the FAO - their work informs how…
sastyk | June 10, 2011Note: I'm off to DC for ASPO-USA's annual spring board meeting. The blog will be quiet. I leave you with one of my all-time favorite re-runs, lightly updated to reflect the ongoing disconnect between dream and reality ;-). But what would life be without fantasy? I find it helpful to reflect on how the world outside and inside my heads meet and fail to meet when I test my own assumptions.
Fantasy, 1977: When I grow up I am going to be a doctor and garbage collector by day, driving my super-cool garbage truck on rounds, and at night, will become Wonder Woman, complete with breasts and magic…