Social Sciences
drorzel | October 9, 2010I missed last week's installment of Short Story Club while traveling, but want to get caught up again with this week's story, "Miguel and the Viatura." I'm not sure this will be posted in time to get into the discussion post, but we'll see.
The title character, Miguel, lives in a future city that is not clearly identified, but based on the names is presumably in Brazil. The story opens as he is trailing behind his brother Joaõ on the way to see his father. His father, it turns out, has quite literally sold himself, allowing his body to be filled with magic nanotechnology, and inhabited by…
oracknows | October 8, 2010Around about this time last year, the nation, nay, the world, was in the throes of a frenzy about the H1N1 influenza pandemic. It was also fertile ground for skeptical blogging for two reasons. First, it was a major health-related story. Second, the mass vaccination campaigns for H1N1 that governments thew together hurriedly was a magnet for quacks, cranks, and loons of the anti-vaccine variety. Truly, the craziness came fast and furious, with each new day bringing a new atrocity against science and reason. Indeed, even one of my favorite magazines, The Atlantic, wasn't immune, as…
mikethemadbiologist | October 6, 2010Once again, Janet Stemwedel reminds us why we keep professional philosophers around. On Monday, in response to cancer researcher Scott Kern's moaning about how cancer researchers don't work hard enough, I asked if science was a job or a calling? Janet framed the question far better than I did (and go read the whole thing--there's lots of good stuff in there):
...if scientific researchers and the special skills they have are so very vital to providing for the needs of other members of society -- vital enough that people like Kern feel it's appropriate to harangue them for wanting any time…
sastyk | October 5, 2010This post ran a year and half ago at The Oil Drum, but I thought it was worth re-running, as I begin my new Adapting in Place class (still two spots if anyone wants them - email jewishfarmer@gmail.com - and no, it isn't too late!). How do you even get started thinking about how to prepare for a lower energy and less stable climate future?
Beginnings
The first question to ask is whether we should take in-place Adaptation seriously at all. Shouldn't we, ideally, try and choose the best possible place to deal with the coming crisis? Some analysts suggest we will have to have vast population…
sastyk | October 4, 2010
It is pouring down rain - Tropical Storm Nicole is dumping 5 inches on us - and the dogs are barking out of control. I can't see a thing in the storm, but I suddenly realize what they must be barking at - I forgot to put Blackberry in the barn.
Blackberry, you see, is our pet rooster. He's so gentle than my children carry him around. Isaiah, who has a special rapport with animals snuggles him under his arm. In the winter, the children tried to teach him to ski down the plow piles. In the summer, they come running when Blackberry roams into the road, which for some reason, he does daily…
oracknows | October 4, 2010If there's one thing that burns me about so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) clinical trials, it's how unethical many of them are. This is particularly true for trials that test modalities that, on the basic science grounds alone, can be dismissed as so highly implausible and with such a low prior probability of success that it is unethical to subject patients to risk with close to zero potential for benefit. Perhaps the most egregious example of such a clinical trial is the Gonzalez protocol in pancreatic cancer, a cornucopia of woo and quackery including up to 150…
gregladen | October 2, 2010Human societies tend to be at least a little polygynous. This finding, recently reported in PLoS genetics, does not surprise us but is nonetheless important. This important in two ways: 1) This study uncovers numerical details of human genetic variation that are necessary to understand change across populations and over time; and 2) the variation across populations are interesting and, in fact, seem to conform to expectations (in a "we don't' really care about statistical significance" sort of way, for now) regarding human social organization.
~ A repost ... because effective polygyny is…
sastyk | September 30, 2010Like everyone in the rich world, I carry bottles of water with me everywhere I go. Were someone from the past to spot me, they'd be stunned by the sight of all the people, clearly headed on long treks into the uninhabited jungle, carrying water lest they die of dehydration. Because, after all, in historical terms, at least in the US, one carries a canteen or other source of water while camping or otherwise engaged in a trek to uncertain, undeveloped lands. In populated areas, folks 30 or 40 years ago, would have told a thirsty person - "wait until we get to the water fountain."
You remember…
cwilcox | September 29, 2010Recently, I got this e-mail forwarded to me. It started out with the header
World shame coast in COSTA RICA
Followed by images like these:
and it concluded with the message:
Please distribute widely.
The Turtle eggs are stolen to be sold.
The planet is thankful for the forwarding of this email.
The e-mail isn't an isolated incident. A quick internet search will immediately bring up sites like this one, heralding the extinction of sea turtles in Costa Rica due to the illegal harvest of their eggs.
Look, I know it looks bad. Yes, the photos are real and of people taking thousands of sea…
gregladen | September 24, 2010"Everyone needs to understand the basic facts of evolution as well as the essentials of the scientific method... When people are deprived of a scientific approach to reality as a whole, they are robbed of both a full appreciation of the beauty and richness of the natural world and the means to understand the dynamics of change not only in nature but in human society as well."
-Ardea Skybreak, "The Science of Evolution and the Myth of Creationism"
~ A repost for Back to School Special ~
Ardea Skybreak's new book, "The Science of Evolution and the Myth of Creationism: Knowing What's Real and…
oracknows | September 24, 2010Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to expect. This is one of those times. Besides getting into full R01 grant-writing swing, I went out to dinner last night with a visiting professor and didn't get home until too late for me to grind out one of those 2,000-4,000 word screeds you've come to know and a love. So enjoy this bit of Classic Insolence from back in November 2006 that, shockingly, as far as I can tell I've never "rerun" before. Remember, if you've been reading less than four…
drorzel | September 23, 2010
Learning the Rules « Easily Distracted
"Today, for a zillion complicated reasons, many of them having nothing to do with the academy itself, the discrete knowledge that constitutes meaningful cultural capital within various professional and social worlds is much more fragmented, as are those worlds themselves. [...]Sometimes you'll get this in college, sometimes you'll get it from friends, and sometimes you won't get it until later.
This is fine: I am not one of those pining for the ability to compress the culture back into a tightly canonical straitjacket. What I wonder about is whether…
dolittle | September 21, 2010I just watched a re-run of the movie March of the Penguins...so cute! The movie documents how emperor penguins survive their long winter fast while incubating eggs. In fact, researchers have shown that penguins spend about half their time huddling with other penguins. This allows them to lower their metabolic rate by as much as 25%. To better understand this, Drs. Caroline Gilbert, Yvon le Maho, Andre Ancel (Institut Pluridisciplinaire Hubert Curien, Strasbourg) and Martine Perret (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, France) measured the deep…
jgoldman | September 20, 2010
Cooperation and conflict are both a part of human society. While a good deal of the academic literature addresses the evolutionary origins of conflict, in recent years there has been an increased focus on the investigation of the evolutionary origins of cooperative behavior. One component of cooperative behavior that might be present in other animals is aversion to inequity. Some scientists have suggested that inequity aversion may itself be the main factor driving the enforcement of cooperation. Put simply, inequity aversion is the resistance among partners to unequal rewards following…
pharyngula | September 16, 2010Well, what can we say? I thought Catholics were supposed to be scholarly, but Pope Ratzi babbled out a lot of ahistorical nonsense in his first speech on his UK tour.
Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime's attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives. As we reflect on the sobering…
drorzel | September 15, 2010
Lunch at McDonald's - The Amateur Gourmet
"I won't be the first food writer to note that McDonald's makes terrific fries. I've read interviews with chefs who try to emulate that crispy exterior and moist interior, that perfectly pleasing balance of salty, savory and sweet. These fries are prevalent around the world for a reason: food scientists engineered the formula and the formula works. There's no real arguing with that.
It's how you feel afterwards that's the problem."
(tags: food review blogs culture)
Meet the New Wired Science All-Star Bloggers | Wired Science | Wired.com
"At Wired…
jrosenhouse | September 14, 2010Via Jerry Coyne I have just come across this op-ed, from the USA Today, by Chris Mooney. The title: “Spirituality Can Bridge Science-Religion Divide” My initial reaction: No it can't!
Mooney's argument is a standard one:
Across the Western world -- including the United States -- traditional religion is in decline, even as there has been a surge of interest in “spirituality.” What's more, the latter concept is increasingly being redefined in our culture so that it refers to something very much separable from, and potentially broader than, religious faith.
Nowadays, unlike in prior…
drorzel | September 14, 2010
Geocentrism: Was Galileo Wrong? : Starts With A Bang
No. An exhaustive explanation of how we know the Earth goes around the Sun.
(tags: science astronomy physics planets blogs starts-with-bang stupid education)
Testing, the Chinese Way - NYTimes.com
"Professor Cizek, who started his career as a second-grade teacher, said the prevailing philosophy of offering young children unconditional praise and support was probably not the best prescription for successful education. "What's best for kids is frequent testing, where even if they do badly, they can get help and improve and have the…
drorzel | September 12, 2010I do intend to keep reading and commenting on the stories for Torque Control's Short Story Club, but I missed last week's because I couldn't really think of anything to say about it. The story was nicely written, and all, but it's just kind of... there.
This week's post was delayed by my annual day of blog silence, so it will probably miss inclusion in the discussion post, but that's okay, as this is another one where my reaction will be dominated by my own idiosyncratic reactions. This is the type of story where the real point is just to introduce the richly detailed world in which it takes…
drorzel | September 12, 2010
R.W. Wood's lecture demonstrations (1897-1905) | Skulls in the Stars
In the early years of the 20th century, however, the most important physics journals published in English were the Philosophical Magazine and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Truly important results would appear in those journals first, and Physical Review was a second or third tier journal to which authors relegated their incremental and pedagogical discoveries. A number of authors contributed suggested lecture demonstrations, but none was as productive as Wood, who by my count published 5 demonstrates…