Social Sciences
sastyk | February 28, 2011I had been mulling over precisely how to frame this piece for a while, when I read Erik Lindberg's "This Is a Peak Oil Story." which admirably gets at the essential point that I've been wanting to make - that our collective crisis comes to all of us at different times and different ways than we imagined, and that exemptions are only rarely granted. Lindberg writes eloquently of his own experience of trying to undertake change - and failing in large part because of the precise circumstances he is trying to address:
I had imagined the rooftop farm thriving far into the future. Here, my…
mikethemadbiologist | February 27, 2011Merry Sunday. Links for you. Science:
The Effect of Pseudonymity on Blogger Credibility
Confirmed: 80 Percent of all antibacterial drugs used on animals, endangering human health
Can the electronic medical record contain an entire genome?
A drop of treasure, lost in an ocean of debt
The best offense is a good defensin
Other:
Matt Stoller: The Liquidation of Society versus the Global Labor Revival
Another Runaway General: Army Deploys Psy-Ops on U.S. Senators
Did anti-Mubarak protesters assault Lara Logan?
Movement starts to create America's 51st state...splitting Pima County off from…
tfk | February 25, 2011The Wonkroom's Brad Johnson takes on USA Today's Dan Vergano over geoengineering. Geoengineering is the idea that we could combat global warming by pumping sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere, thus blocking some solar radiation and keeping things cooler.
Vergano is a sharp science writer and his take is hardly boosterish, but Johnson dings him for having:
failed to accurately interpret the scientific literature. The only risks he has depicted â ones that involve the potential deaths of millions if not billions of people â are the âknownâ ones, the ones easily modeled by imperfect…
pharyngula | February 23, 2011Here is the last of Anthony Horvath's ghastly morality tales. This one is the easiest to summarize, because there isn't much to say about it: Richard Dawkins dies, goes to heaven, is judged, and sent to hell. It's short, only seven pages long, and five of them are spent in loving description of the disintegration of Dawkins. It's nothing but a horror story for Christians in which the bad guy meets a grisly end.
The blurb for the book declares that "these stories draw from what is known publicly to imagine what would happen in this most private of moments." Yet there is essentially nothing…
egrossman | February 22, 2011By Elizabeth Grossman
As I've watched the hearings House Republicans have been holding over the past couple of weeks on the economic impact of environmental and occupational health and safety regulations, I've been thinking about what I've learned about and seen of the working and environmental conditions in places that are now the hub of world manufacturing. I've been picturing the smog that hangs over Chinese cities. I've been thinking about the fatal despair of young high-tech workers at Foxconn and Samsung factories in China and South Korea, about the depressed wages and severe working…
pharyngula | February 20, 2011As I was making my slow, anxious way thorugh the blizzard, creeping along through the whiteness on my way home, I saw a sign. It was a big sign by the side of the freeway advertising the Cremation Society of Minnesota…and then moments after that, my car nearly ate a big red van in front of me that was ambling along with its lights off. I decided then that this was probably not the best time to be one of the idiots on the road. So I have stashed myself in the very first hotel I could find.
I won't be making it to class in the morning. My human physiology students can snooze away the morning…
sastyk | February 20, 2011What I stand for is what I stand on. - Wendell Berry
Note: You've got to give the Dervaes' some credit - their asshattery has inspired a wholel lot of focus on urban sustainable agriculture, homesteading and making a good life in the city! Today is "Urban Homesteading Day" and in its honor, here are some meditations on the relationships we need between city homesteaders and farmers, country homesteaders and farmers and everyone in between.
Urbanization is the biggest trend in history. For the first time, more human beings live in cities than in the country. More than 50,000 farmers worldwide…
pharyngula | February 18, 2011McGrath is back, straining to refute atheism. This time, his argument is with the claim that faith is blind. Is not, he says! And then proceeds to muddle together faith with belief with morality with science until he's got a nice incoherent stew, at which time he points to a few floaty bits in the otherwise unresolvable mess and calls that support for his superstitions. It's pathetic and unconvincing, except perhaps to someone who wants to believe anyway.
Here's an example of where his whole argument falls to pieces. He wants to claim that faith is simply a reasonable extrapolation from…
tfk | February 17, 2011Martin Cothran â proponent of patriarchy, hyper of the heteronormative, crusader for creationists, water-carrier for women-haters, doyen of defenders of Holocaust deniers, troubadour of traitors â thinks I should insult him more classily. If he's serious about that, he needs to do different sorts of offensive things. How many ways are there to call him out for defending â at length! â Pat Buchanan's anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial? How many ways are there to say that he's a doctrinaire conservative who (therefore) wants to drag Kentucky back to the 18th century, where men were men,…
drorzel | February 17, 2011
Career Advice: Why We Said No - Inside Higher Ed
"My department has run a search for at least one faculty member every year for the last 10 years. I literally cannot remember how many search committees I have served on, let alone how many candidates I have interviewed. A few years ago I was the chair of a single search committee that hired four tenure-track professors at the assistant or associate level. This year we have two separate search committees going.
Institutions and departments have different policies and cultures, so I certainly cannot speak for search committees everywhere, but…
gregladen | February 16, 2011How do you separate harmless belief in religion or superstition and ... well, harmful belief in religion or superstition? We have been having a bit of a go-round* between some of my regular blog readers, including my Catholic but not anti-Evolution niece whose daughter recently acted in a commercial for the Creation Museum in Kentucky. Sondrah and I respectfully agree to disagree about certain issues, but clearly do agree on the importance of having real science, and not creationism, taught in public schools. That is what a lot of people who think of themselves as religious prefer,…
jrosenhouse | February 14, 2011Sociologist Phil Zuckerman of Pitzer College has been a hero of mine ever since he published (in 2008) an excellent book called Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment. He studied Sweden and Denmark, where atheists predominate, and showed rather effectively that when religious demagogues wail about the pernicious moral effects of a society losing its faith they are just making stuff up.
So you can imagine my disappointment at reading this asinine essay over at HuffPo. It's a poor representative of a tiresome genre: An atheist lectures his flock…
sastyk | February 14, 2011This is a lightly revised and updated version of a piece that ran at ye olde blogge and at Grist, but it seems just as pertinent now as it did in 2007 when I wrote it. At the time, some people doubted that the boom we were seeing in biofuel production, which was pushing up grain prices, would be followed by any kind of a bust. Farmers were predicting many, many good years - but we all know what happened. Farm incomes dropped by more than 20% during the recession. Just another reminder that busts are part of the boom and bust cycle, no matter how little we like to admit it.
There is no…
drorzel | February 11, 2011
College Inc. - Survey: Community college students prize Internet access over teachers
"More than than 70 percent of students surveyed "believe that it is important to have access to high speed Internet in order to succeed at community college," the report states. "In fact, students tend to believe that high speed Internet access is more important for success than having access to advisors or relationships with professors."
In other words, today's community college student considers an Internet hookup more important than any human on campus."
(tags: academia education internet technology…
tfk | February 10, 2011A while back, Martin Cothran (who, in keeping with long tradition here, it must be noted remains a bigot in a staggering diversity of realms, not least his apparent desire to defend a dictator's decision to cut internet access to his nation in hopes of stymieing a revolution) declared:
A person should be legally required to read Edmund Burke before publicly identifying himself as a conservative. Of course, it would be anti-Burkean make such a legal requirement, but you get my drift. Modern conservatism starts with Burke, and should end with him.
I'd modify this to say "should have ended,"…
jtoney | February 10, 2011Breaking news of the potential end to Egypt's President Mubarek's time in office indicates that the "transition" may well become a resolution very soon, perhaps tomorrow, Friday, February 11. Will this date mark a new chapter of Egyptian history?
I sincerely hope that this crisis ends quickly and peacefully. This is, fundamentally, a human rights issue.
BREAKING NEWS: Noon on February 11
Is this the beginning of a wave of change?
CAIRO -- President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt resigned his post and turned over all power to the military, ending his 30 years of autocratic rule and bowing to a…
tfk | February 10, 2011Somehow, this passage from John Rawls Political Liberalism seems relevant to Egypt, to anti-creationism, to the disputes over gnu atheism, and even to a forthcoming reply to Martin Cothran on the nature of human rights:
Now the serious problem is this. A modern democratic society is characterized not simply by a pluralism of comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines but by a pluralism of incompatible yet reasonable comprehensive doctrines. No one of these doctrines is affirmed by citizens generally. Nor should one expect that in the foreseeable future one of them, or some…
tfk | February 9, 2011Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse are not accommodationists. At least, they say they aren't, and that's hard to evaluate, because "accommodationist" is a bad word, and to ensure that it stays a bad word, critics of accommodationists give it protean meanings. Sometimes it's supposed to mean the belief that science and religion are compatible. Sometimes it's just about atheists working with religious people toward shared goals. Other times, "accommodationist" seems to constitute the subset of anti-creationists who oppose gnu atheists. The label "accommodationist" has been thrust upon me…
sa smith | February 9, 2011I get a ton of spam in the comments of ERV.
Happily, we have a really good spam filter (too good sometimes, as most of us, even me, have gotten comments sent straight to spam for no discernible reason), but still, a bit of Turkish spam or STD dating site spam or steroid spam gets through now and then, and I have to manually remove it.
So at first I was a bit annoyed when a comment was let through a couple days ago that appeared to be spam. It had the markers-- late to the party ('older' post, ie 11 days old), simply a link in the comment section, same link as the 'website' of the commentor,…
gregladen | February 8, 2011A Better Grip: T Cells Strengthen Our Hand against Influenza Clinical Infectious Diseases, 52 (1), 8-9 DOI: 10.1093/cid/ciq018Flu vaccines are important and useful, but also relatively ineffective compared to many other vaccines. Immunity is imperfect, there are many 'strains' of influenza in a given year only some of which are addressed by the available vaccine (though often the most common ones) and one year's vaccine does not provide immunity to subsequent years' influenza because the virus changes so much. Well, actually that's not exactly true: The influenza virus has various…