Social Sciences
jdupuis | November 3, 2010For your reading and collection development pleasure. It's been so long since I last did one of these listings, I actually have another one coming up in a day or so.
Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia by Joseph Michael Reagle Jr. (ISBN-13: 978-0262014472)
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is built by a community--a community of Wikipedians who are expected to "assume good faith" when interacting with one another. In Good Faith Collaboration, Joseph Reagle examines this unique collaborative culture.
Wikipedia, says Reagle, is not the first effort to create a freely shared,…
mikethemadbiologist | November 2, 2010Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice filed an amicus brief which argued that naturally-occurring DNA sequences can't be patented:
Reversing a longstanding policy, the federal government said on Friday that human and other genes should not be eligible for patents because they are part of nature....
"We acknowledge that this conclusion is contrary to the longstanding practice of the Patent and Trademark Office, as well as the practice of the National Institutes of Health and other government agencies that have in the past sought and obtained patents for isolated genomic DNA," the brief…
oracknows | November 2, 2010One of the great things about having declared Vaccine Awareness Week is that it gives me a convenient excuse to revisit topics and blog posts that I had meant to address but that somehow didn't make the cut the first time around. This is the sort of thing that happens fairly frequently in blogging, where there is far too much woo and idiocy for one blogger to have even a hope of ever addressing it all.
And that's just the anti-vaccine movement.
In any case, if there's one thing about the anti-vaccine movement that I've noticed, it's that its members have a very warped view of both science and…
dolittle | November 1, 2010
Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell is Co-founder/CEO of Utopia Scientific and an instructor in the Department of Otolaryngology at Stanford University in California. Research in the O'Connell-Rodwell laboratory focuses on communication through vibrations in large mammals.
In a previous blog, I discussed Dr. O'Connell-Rodwell's research as presented in a feature podcast from The American Physiological Society. Her research on elephant communication sparked quite a bit of conversation. Therefore, I decided to invite Dr. O'Connell-Rodwell to be interviewed, and she agreed. Here is an exerpt from our…
sa smith | November 1, 2010A group of OKC Atheists went to one of those 'Hell Houses' last night.
I didnt go, but I can only assume from their summary of the event, that the parishioners of Wilmont Place Baptist Church in OKC have absolutely no social grace or even basic, common decency.
You see, we have had a little 'spat' of young people committing suicide recently. Young people killing themselves after enduring constant bullying and tormenting by their peers. Not just in 'LA' or 'NYC', but right at home, here in OKC.
What was the 'plot' of Wilmont Place Baptist Churchs 'Judgment House'? Why, a young girl who has…
mikethemadbiologist | November 1, 2010Yes, I'm travelling today, but that doesn't mean I can't harangue you (and, yes, I sent in my absentee ballot).
If you're a member of the Coalition of the Sane, tomorrow's election, at the national level, is unappealing. The Congressional Democrats' unofficial motto of "Vote for us because we won't be as dreadful as the Republicans" is hardly inspiring. I'm definitely sympathetic towards those who don't want to vote for the Democrat--all I would ask is that you consider how worse your local Republican alternative is before you abstain or write in a third party. But it really is disgusting…
pharyngula | October 31, 2010Kevin Myers is some wackalooney Irish commentator who, as far as I know and as fervently as I hope, is no recent relation to this Myers — the only thing I can commend him on is that he manages to spell his last name correctly. Oh, we do have one other thing in common: we're both atheists. He's an idiot atheist, though, so I wash my hands of him. He recently made this admission while also acknowledging his flaming hypocrisy.
Now what follows is quite hypocritical. For, on the one hand, I simply don't believe in God, because I am intellectually unable to; but on the other, I prefer a society…
sastyk | October 31, 2010I admit, maybe because of that intellectual slowdown that the cold weather and dark days call, but I'm confused about which one of these is the real Onion Headline - that thing about the Brookings Institute guy or a BBC headline that reads "World Bank Leads Economic Push on Nature Protection." Really? Seriously? The World Bank? Are we sure this isn't April Fools, not Halloween?
But no, it is serious. Or at least trying to be:
The World Bank has launched a global partnership aimed at helping countries include the costs of destroying nature into their national accounts.
Ten nations will…
mikethemadbiologist | October 26, 2010A problem in genome-wide association studies ("GWAS") is the"missing heritability" issue--identified genetic variation can only account for a small fraction of the estimated genetic contribution to variation in that trait. Razib has a good roundup of several explanations (and I added some speculation about nearly-neutral mutations).
GWAS also have problems accurately characterizing the trait. For example, not all heart diseases (note the plural) are alike, so we have to be certain that we accurately assess the trait of interest. But what is very rarely discussed is the environmental…
sastyk | October 26, 2010One of the tensions in my life -is that between two kinds of time. "Fast Time" is the world I live in, the one with a two hour meeting scheduled at 7pm, my husband's classes at 12:35, Eli's bus at 8:15 and 3:30... payments due by the first of the month, etc... It is the world run on clocks and calendars, where expectations can be fixed and formalized. All of us live in fast time in some measure, some of us almost completely, others only barely. There is, however, no good way of escaping it entirely.
I also live in slow time. Slow time is the world of things that cannot be subject to…
mikethemadbiologist | October 24, 2010Better late than never. Links for you. Science:
Bacteria using bacteria
Why boomerangs come back
This too, too solid flesh...
Double whammy reveals cholesterol gene
Colourful parrot feathers resist bacterial degradation
Other:
St Kern's way is the American Way
EXCLUSIVE: Michael Mann responds to Rep. Barton
Please Just Make Sullivan Stop Writing About This
Hemp Is the Far Bigger Economic Issue Hiding Behind Legal Marijuana: Prop 19 will open up California to hemp, a multi-billion-dollar crop that has been a staple of human agriculture for thousands of years.
The Culture of Poverty Debate
gregladen | October 22, 2010Human infants require more care than they should, if we form our expectations based on closely related species (apes, and more generally, Old World simian primates). It has been said that humans are born three months early. This is not accurate. It was thought that our body size predicted a 12 month gestation, and some suggested that Neanderthals would have had such, but this research conclusion has been set aside based on new analysis. But it is still true that developmentally, human children do not reach a stage of development that allows some degree of self care for a very long time…
mikethemadbiologist | October 19, 2010To steal a phrase. By way of ScienceBlogling David Sloan Wilson, we come across an interesting white paper, "The Relevance of Evolutionary Science For Economic Theory and Policy" (pdf). Since I'm an evolutionary biologist, you would probably expect me to be partial to the white paper, but I'm not convinced.
ZOMG!! TEH DARWINISMZ!!
No, that's not why. I'll leave aside the focus on general equilibrium theory in economics* (I don't care for it either), and simply note that the current spate of problems really aren't theoretical in nature, but ideological and methodological.
The latter,…
sastyk | October 19, 2010Part I : Defining a functional local food system
We got a supermarket in the springtime, and much has been made of that in my area. Many of the area's people rhapsodized about it - one woman told me she'd been waiting 15 years. It is about 8 miles from my house (compared to 13 to the nearest one before), in a town that is making the shift from rural to bedroom suburb, in an area that isn't quite ready for outer bedroom suburbs.
Before the store opened there was much talk about how our area had been and would no longer be a "food desert." This term means an area where there simply isn't…
drorzel | October 17, 2010
It's Time To Forgive George Lucas
"I cannot defend the prequels, despite their many laudable qualities: often wonderful if no longer industry-defining special effects; Jedi Knights that are warriors to be feared and respected; a glimpse of a splendid Republic of majestic alien races, a galaxy worth fighting for.
What I can say now, after rewatching the best film of the series on the occasion of its 30th anniversary, The Empire Strikes Back, is that George Lucas is directly responsible for one of the things that has given me the greatest, most quantifiable joy (if by "money spent" alone) in…
dolittle | October 15, 2010As the heat drags on in the southwestern United States, I cannot stop dreaming about sledding through the snow. So I checked out the trusty American Physiological Society press releases to see what the animals might be doing in cold environments that I can only dream about these days.
In my search I watched a really neat video of Dr. Michael Davis (Center for Veterinary Health Sciences at Oklahoma State University) who works on perhaps one of the "coolest" animals (pun completely intended): sled dogs! Oh, how I envy these animals. Racing sled dogs are incredible athletes as they traverse the…
tfk | October 14, 2010Attention conservation notice: 3200 words attempting to correct what may be a fatally flawed analogy between New Atheism and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s approach to the civil rights movement.
In replying to Jason's post the other day, I skipped over some important issues that were peripheral to my main point. But I want to double back on a comment he made that I've seen New/Affirmative/Extreme/gnu atheists toss out rather too often. The claim is that they are, in some sense, analogous to Martin Luther King, Jr. Jason, being sophisticated and smart, and knowing that using analogies on the…
dolittle | October 13, 2010Who doesn't love horses? I was just reading a fascinating archived press release from The American Physiological Society about these icons of all western movies.
Researchers John Hermanson, Norm Ducharme and Jonathan Cheetham (Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine), John Bertram (University of Calgary, College of Medicine), and Michael Butcher (Youngstown State University, Department of Biological Sciences) examined the coordination of movement and breathing in horses (equine). These systems are reported to work in a concerted effort to allow horses to walk, trot, gallop and run…
jrosenhouse | October 12, 2010I should probably warn you that this is a long one. So either get comfortable or go elsewhere!
Josh Rosenau has a post up, replying to this earlier post from Jerry Coyne, who was discussing this L. A. Times article about the recent secular humanist conference in Los Angeles. At the conference there was a panel discussion between Chris Mooney, Genie Scott, P. Z. Myers and Victor Stenger on everyone's favorite topic: Accommodationism!
During his presentation, Mooney repeated some of the sentiments from his USA Today op-ed discussing the notion of “atheist spirituality.”. I discussed some…
tfk | October 11, 2010Last weekend, Chris Mooney and Genie Scott squared off against PZ Myers and Vic Stenger at the Council for Secular Humanism's 30th anniversary bash. The question was something to do with whether accommodationism is teh awsum or teh lamez0rs. You know my opinion, and from what I saw of the discussion, I don't think anyone emerged the undisputed victor, and thus the internet will never run out of flamewars.
Anyway, in reading the L.A. Times report on the event, Jerry Coyne wonders:
How can Mooney, The Great Communicator, think that if atheist accommodationists and atheist non-accommodationists…