Social Sciences
tetrapodzoology | May 13, 2011Over the past several months months and months I've been trying to complete a series of articles on the various sac- and pocket-like head and neck structures that have evolved in such diverse mammals as apes, horses, camels and baleen whales (links to the previous articles in the series are provided below). In an effort to get the series finished, here's the next part of the series. This time, we focus on rodents, rabbits and hyraxes. Yeah, just like it says above, in the title.
It's well known that pneumatisation of the skull bones is widespread in mammals: sinuses in the nasal region,…
drorzel | May 13, 2011
Writing About Science, and Liking It. In the Pipeline:
"I remember William Rusher, who used to publish National Review, writing about how he had to tell a colleague that "there is no concept so simple that I can fail to understand it when presented as a graph". That made me feel the two cultures divide, for sure. But it's perhaps not as stark as the classic C. P. Snow formulation: there are plenty of scientists who appreciate literature and the arts, and (as McPhee notes), there are plenty of people who know more about the humanities who find that they enjoy scientific topics once they're…
tfk | May 11, 2011
In cleaning out my open webpages, I came across the video above in an important post at Wired blogs, and it hardly matters that the post is from last October (yes, I keep too many tabs open in Firefox). Rhett Allain argues that there's an inverse relationship between how much standardized testing students experience, and how much learning they experience, and Ken Robinson, in the video, argues that standardized testing assumes that there is a single standard way of learning, or that such standardization is desirable. The video touches on a wide range of points beyond that, and is well…
gregladen | May 5, 2011This will be of interest to many of you:
Karen Stollznow and Elizabeth Loftus Join the Board
Amherst, NY-May 5, 2011-The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) welcomes two additions to its executive council. Karen Stollznow and Elizabeth Loftus recently accepted posts.
Karen Stollznow has spent over a decade investigating pseudoscientific and paranormal beliefs and practices, including ghosts, aura reading, psychics, medical intuitives, alternatives therapies, mediums, faith healing, conspiracy theories, cults, pareidolia (seeing faces on places other than heads), religion, haunted houses,…
cagapakis | May 5, 2011It's been an exciting week for me. On Monday I successfully defended my thesis! Now that I have established my scientific credibility to you all, here is a picture of me at my defense party wearing my "Trust me I'm a Dr" Dr. Pepper t-shirt and hitting my SpongeBob SquarePants piñata.
And on Tuesday I went to two really interesting events/talks/discussions about science and scientists. First up was Debbie Chachra's awesome seminar "Unpacking Gender: Men and Women in Science, Technology, and More," sponsored by the Harvard Graduate Women in Science and Engineering. She described her seminar…
omnibrain | May 2, 2011And you can too! All you have to do is win this gorilla costume. This is guaranteed to work in a women's locker room*. I can't vouch for its success rate in men's locker rooms since.. well... I don't really have to sneak in there. Anyway, all you have to do to have a chance of winning this amazing gorilla suit is to pre-order the new paper back version of Dan Simons' and Chris Chabris' book The Invisible Gorilla.
If you're not into sick horrible ideas like sneaking into locker rooms (because clearly, that is the only thing you could possibly do with that costume) you could also pre-order…
aardvarchaeology | April 30, 2011For some years I have been a happy reader of (and frequent commenter on) Current Archaeology. Now Dear Reader Marcus Smith has arranged (or bought?) a complimentary subscription for me to the other big UK pop-arch mag, British Archaeology. While CA is a private property, BA is published by the Council for British Archaeology, "an educational charity working throughout the UK to involve people in archaeology and to promote the appreciation and care of the historic environment for the benefit of present and future generations", as Wikipedia puts it.
The first issue of British Archaeology to…
sastyk | April 26, 2011April is the month that utility shut-offs are resumed in much of the northern half of the country - it is against the law to shut off people's primary heating fuel during the winter, but when they can't pay their bills, generally speaking, April 1 means that you can cut them off. There has been some upheaval in our area, where an unusually cold spring has meant that there is still a need for supplemental heating, and many poor people with very cold houses.
I thought it was worth re-running this article - a version of this ran in 2005, and I've republished it several times since then. We…
aardvarchaeology | April 26, 2011
[More about photography, children, childpornography, pornography, porn; fotografi, barn, pornografi, porr, barnporr, barnpornografi.]
In issue 2011:1 of Fotografisk Tidskrift, the journal of the Swedish Photographer's Association, is a fine essay in Swedish by Jens Liljestrand (Twitter @jensliljestrand) about current attitudes to images of children and the definition of child pornography. Before the piece could be printed with the accompanying photographs, the journal's editor, my friend Jenny Morelli, had to clear its contents with the rights holders, who don't know Swedish. So she asked me…
drorzel | April 24, 2011
nanoscale views: Public funding of science, and access to information
"While this is an interesting topic, I'd rather discuss a related issue: How much public funding triggers the need to make something publicly available? For example, suppose I used NSF funding to buy a coaxial cable for $5 as part of project A. Then, later on, I use that coax in project B, which is funded at the $100K level by a non-public source. I don't think any reasonable person would then argue that all of project B's results should become public domain because of 0.005% public support. When does the obligation…
illconsidered | April 23, 2011There is a very interesting article on Nature.com that provides an example of something a bit uncommon in the climate wars: an intelligent and well reasoned disagreement with the IPCC. (h/t to Climate Etc.)
The article is well worth the read in its entirety, but its central point is a relatively straightforward one. The smaller the portion of the earth's surface (or time period for that matter) you are examining, the more difficult and less useful it is to consider attribution of climate change. And yet, the IPCC, according to this article, is seeking research that specifically attributes…
tfk | April 21, 2011A few days ago I was over at Jerry Coyne's blog and got into some conversations that regular readers here might be interested in. In the course of one of his regularly scheduled whinefests about how people are too mean to gnu atheists, Coyne wrote:
we're not McCarthyites with a secret "list". Here are some professed atheists who have been unusually (and I'd add unreasonably) critical of Gnu Atheists: Julian Baggini, Jacques Berlinerblau, Andrew Brown, R. Joseph Hoffmann, Jean Kazez, Chris Mooney, Massimo Pigliucci, Josh Rosenau, Michael Ruse, and Jeremy Stangroom.
There were two things that…
oracknows | April 20, 2011Over the years, I've learned that a lot of surgeons are very religious. Actually, a lot of doctors are quite religious. Indeed, long ago in the history of this blog, back when I used to write about evolution a lot more than I do these days, I've pointed out that at least as many physicians as the general public accept "intelligent design" creationism as a valid description of the origin of life. Indeed, 15% of physicians believe that states should be required to teach ID and 50% believe that states should be permitted to teach it. In other words, approximately 65% of physicians are in favor…
tfk | April 19, 2011Chris Mooney has been hard at work lately, through his journalism, his blogging, and his podcast at the Center for Inquiry, trying to understand why denialism is so pervasive. In the new issue of Mother Jones, he lays out some of "The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science":
an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has ...demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called "motivated reasoning" helps explain why we find…
jdupuis | April 19, 2011
Stop the Madness: The Insanity of ROI and the Need for New Qualitative Measures of Academic Library Success
29 Statistics Reveal How The Apple's iPad Is Changing Our Lives
Building Types Study: Libraries
Learning Through Digital Media: Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy
The Academic Library Impact on Student Persistence
Scientists & the Social Media
Retooling Libraries Indeed
The Agony and the Advocacy/The Advocacy and the Apathy
Collaborating with Faculty Part I: A Five-Step Program
Context Matters
Incompetent Research Skills Curb Users' Problem Solving
Web search reading list
Going…
drorzel | April 19, 2011
Keeping the Keys to the Kingdom « Easily Distracted
"I'm very much with my colleagues in their call for a renewal of practical wisdom. But in their view-and mine-one of the consequences of such a turn would be that we'd stop trying to make systems, rules and structures do to us, for us, with us, what we ought to do for ourselves. That's my concern with the call that Price makes, that a reminder to be a more decent human being easily curdles into an institutional imperative to do so, and from there into a set of rules, strictures and requirements that are tasked with taking away our…
oracknows | April 19, 2011I'd like to thank Buckeye Surgeon for reminding me of something I had seen and wanted to blog about but totally forgot about. Maybe it was so forgettable that I should just skip it, but as a surgeon I actually don't think so. Basically, it's a story of a surgeon making a fool of himself. I know, I know, that's such an impossibility that it's well nigh inconceivable, but it actually did happen. Perhaps what brought my attention to this sordid tale is that there is a connection to the University of Michigan, where I went to both undergraduate and medical school.
The surgeon in question is Dr.…
pharyngula | April 15, 2011Here we go, I'm attending the West Coast Regional Meeting of the Society for Developmental Biology, and I'll be intermittently dumping my notes onto the web, so that's what you'll be getting today -- my sometimes cryptic impressions of a series of developmental biology talks.
This is the early morning session. It's late in the day for this Minnesotan, though…but beware, that just means I may start flagging this afternoon.
08:30-10:00 Session 1: Stem Cells in Development and Regeneration (Chair: Monika Ward [Univ. Hawaii])
Hey, speakers get lei'ed at the start of their talk! I guess I…
oracknows | April 15, 2011Time and time again, anti-vaccine activists will piously and self-righteously tell those of us who criticize their pseudoscientific fear mongering, "I'm not anti-vaccine," followed by something like, "I'm pro-vaccine safety," "I'm a vaccine safety watchdog," or "I'm pro-safe vaccine." Nothing puts the lie to these denials better than looking at the sorts of things anti-vaccine activists say and write in their own lairs.
For instance, here we have a commenter by the 'nym of veritas (no hubris there!) over at the anti-vaccine blog Age of Autism discussing the Poul Thorsen scandal:
I just wonder…
sastyk | April 14, 2011Let us imagine that you are MacGyver, that 1980s tv guy who can build an atomic bomb out of gum and duct tape. You are facing a world-shattering crisis. You have a pile of scrap materials out of which you must build a high speed vehicle to effect your escape from this crisis, which will certainly involve you outracing a dramatic explosion. There are wheels, gears, sticks and the all-important duct tape. There's also a big claw-footed bathtub. Now, when your need is for lightness and speed, do you attach the bathtub, just because you've got one lying around?
This analogy was used to me…