Social Sciences
clock | May 10, 2010Vanessa Woods (website, old blog, new blog, Twitter) will be reading from her new book "Bonobo Handshake" (comes out May 27th - you can pre-order on amazon.com) at the Regulator in Durham on May 27th at 7pm, at Quail Ridge Books on June 9th at 7:30pm, and at Chapel Hill Borders on June 12th at 2pm.
I have interviewed Vanessa last year so you can learn more about her there.
I received a review copy recently and am halfway through. Once I finish I will post my book review here.
From Publishers Weekly:
Devoted to learning more about bonobos, a smaller, more peaceable species of primate than…
rallain | May 10, 2010This is a question that comes up every now in then. But I would like to ask a few similar questions with my first order approximation answers. I would love to hear some other ideas on these questions.
Do people need a functional understanding of math to function in this world?
I say no. Maybe this is not a popular answer, but this is my first answer. Let me give my reasons. What percent of people in this world have a functional understanding of math? (let me just say functional understanding means they can do basic word problems and understand what is going on) If I estimate this…
terrasig | May 10, 2010I did not turn on the computer yesterday (yes, it was glorious) so I missed Mother's Day coverage in our local newspaper. When we returned home, I was happy to see that on the front page of the print copy the dean of Duke School of Medicine, Nancy Andrews, MD, PhD, was featured with her daughter in the lab on their fun Saturdays together.
Also cited and pictured in the article was Duke vice dean for research and professor of pharmacology and cancer biology, Sally Kornbluth, PhD, and her daughter.
Written by News & Observer science editor Sarah Avery, the article describes how women are…
pharyngula | May 9, 2010I'm still wrestling with Sam Harris's and Richard Carrier's ideas that there can be a scientific foundation for morality. I guess I am concerned with the claim that we can science our way to a moral society; I am more comfortable with the idea that we can develop an objective criterion for judging an act as not moral, or not just, or not contributing to the wellbeing of individuals or cultures. Can I, as a godless humanist, say that this is wrong?
An Islamist rebel administration in Somalia has had a 13-year-old girl stoned to death for adultery after the child's father reported that she was…
grrlscientist | May 9, 2010tags: Did Religion Have an Evolutionary Value?, religion, psychology, social structure, social commentary, cultural observation, Richard Dawkins, streaming video
Richard Dawkins argues that humanity's historical predisposition towards religion and supernatural beliefs may have held an evolutionary utility. "The rule of thumb: 'Believe whatever your parents tell you,' quite clearly could have survival value," says Dawkins.
He's the King of All the Atheists (um, yeah, right), and now Richard Dawkins is hammering home what he sees as his key argument against the existence of God. In his book,…
tlambert | May 7, 2010255 members of the US National Academy of Sciences including 11 Nobel Laureates have signed an open letter in opposition to the attacks on science and scientists from global warming deniers:
We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular. All citizens should understand some basic scientific facts. There is always some uncertainty associated with scientific conclusions; science never absolutely proves anything. When someone says that society should wait until scientists are absolutely certain before taking…
hrynyshyn | May 7, 2010There's a letter in today's Science from 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences that deserves to be read:
Climate Change and the Integrity of Science
We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular. All citizens should understand some basic scientific facts. There is always some uncertainty associated with scientific conclusions; science never absolutely proves anything. When someone says that society should wait until scientists are absolutely certain before taking any action, it is the…
bioephemera | May 6, 2010Civility: wow, everybody's concerned about it now! Here's our president a couple of days ago:
The problem is that this kind of vilification and over-the-top rhetoric closes the door to the possibility of compromise. It undermines democratic deliberation. It prevents learning -- since, after all, why should we listen to a "fascist," or a "socialist," or a "right-wing nut," or a left-wing nut"? It makes it nearly impossible for people who have legitimate but bridgeable differences to sit down at the same table and hash things out. It robs us of a rational and serious debate, the one we need…
goodmath | May 4, 2010 I know that I just posted a link to a stupid religious argument, but I was sent a link to
another one, which I can't resist mocking.
As I've written about quite often, we humans really stink at
understanding big numbers, and how things scale.
href="http://thebeachnotes.blogspot.com/2010/05/tragedy-on-college-campuses.html">This
is an example of that. We've got a jerk who's about to graduate from a dinky
christian college, who believes that there must be something special
about the moral atmosphere at his college, because in his four years at the
school, there hasn't been a single murder…
drorzel | May 4, 2010
Online civility: between 10,000 cliques and 2 cultures, where's the neutral ground? : bioephemera
"Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the blogosphere abhors a neutral and nonpartisan blog. For whatever reasons, cultural or historical, participants expect partisanship. They want to know if you're with them or against them; the dedicated communities at various blogs can be pretty defensive of their space, and sometimes stream like lemmings through the aether to attack a blogger that they perceive as threatening. It's human nature: when our friends get attacked, we get mad. The problem is, we're…
jgoldman | May 1, 2010
The 2010 May edition of our beloved Carnival of Evolution is up today on the official blog for Springer Verlag's journal, Evolution: Education and Outreach. And with that, surely getting your post accepted in CoE is now akin to peer-reviews on some level. Thanks to Adam M. Goldstein for hosting.
I have two pieces up:
Jason G. Goldman’s post, “Starting from the Beginning: Evolutionary and Developmental Origins of Human Knowledge” offers a readable, useful overview of some main approaches and problems in the study of how people think and learn, focusing on “core knowledge systems,” which are…
pharyngula | April 30, 2010John C. Nienstedt is the Archbishop of the Diocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, which makes him the ranking Catholic god-botherer in the region, I guess. We're supposed to call him "Most Reverend" — priests are really good at attaching laudatory titles to themselves — but I won't be doing that, ever. "Most Intolerant," maybe, or "Most Boneheaded".
Anyway, he has an op-ed in the Star Tribune. The Catholic Church is facing some rough times right now, with declining attendance, a dearth of priests, and a scary percentage of the people willing to become priests being clearly socially and…
tfk | April 29, 2010Lord love her, S.E. Cupp has posted the first chapter of her book Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media's Attack on Christianity. That means I've now inflicted two chapters of the damnable thing on myself, and I feel no better for it. You'll recall that the first chapter I saw was her look at evolution. I summarized:
S.E. Cupp's handling of science and religion misrepresents the nature of evolution, obscures the science of biology, and dismisses the deeply-held religious views of most Christians outside of the fundamentalist subculture. This is the sort of misrepresentation which leads her…
grrlscientist | April 27, 2010tags: The Truth About HSUS, pets, animals, animal rights, wingnuts, cults, Wayne Pacelle, Humane Society of the United States, HSUS, streaming video
The real agenda of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) is to remove money from your wallet and put it into their CEOs' retirement funds, to ignore animal shelters, and to forever destroy your ability to live with animals.
stoat | April 27, 2010 Oh well, everyone else has a gate, perhaps I can have one too. Incidentally the picture is there for two reasons: firstly I have far too many pix of Darling Daugther and no-one looks at them. If Jules can put up huts, I can do children. And second, it is a cunning attempt to make me a human bean rather than just a face on the internet, so my enemies will find it harder to attack me. Clever eh?
So, the story so far (pay attention at the back!): I wondered about the list of 3 "key" papers that Curry was proposing should have been considered by the Oxburgh inquiry. Or perhaps by the…
gregladen | April 25, 2010First, let's get this straight. I'm all for anti-science anti-vaxer right wingers not being vaccinated, as long as a) we take their children away from them (and vaccinate the poor dears) and b) isolate the adult anti-vaxers from the rest of the species, perhaps in Texas. But in the meantime, let's look at the latest bit of (mis)information from the utterly insane side of our society. If nothing else, this story may serve to remind us all what we are fighting about.... not the attitude of this or that skeptics, or which movements should or should not be engaged in chopping the pope down to…
mikethemadbiologist | April 23, 2010By way of Echidne, I came across this article about WellPoint's cancellation of insurance policies belonging to women with breast cancer (italics mine):
Shortly after they were diagnosed with breast cancer, each of the women learned that her health insurance had been canceled. There was Yenny Hsu, who lived and worked in Los Angeles. And there was Patricia Reilling, a successful art gallery owner and interior designer from Louisville, Kentucky....
The women paid their premiums on time. Before they fell ill, neither had any problems with their insurance. Initially, they believed their policies…
grrlscientist | April 21, 2010tags: The Truth About HSUS, pets, animals, animal rights, wingnuts, cults, Wayne Pacelle, Humane Society of the United States, HSUS, streaming video
The real agenda of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) is to remove money from your wallet and put it into their CEOs' retirement funds, to ignore animal shelters, and to forever destroy your ability to live with animals.
terrasig | April 19, 2010The 101st Annual Meeting of my primary professional society, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), convened in Washington, DC, on Saturday and will run through Wednesday, April 21. The theme for this year's meeting is "Conquering Cancer Through Discovery Research," and focuses strongly on the translation of discoveries into cancer treatments.
Although the Eyjafjallajökull volcanic dust cloud has delayed many European participants, over 17,000 attendees are expected at the Washington Convention Center where over 6,300 presentations are to be given.
AACR was founded in 1907 by 11…
drorzel | April 19, 2010
Rev. Mod. Phys. 82, 1155 (2010): Introduction to quantum noise, measurement, and amplification
"The topic of quantum noise has become extremely timely due to the rise of quantum information physics and the resulting interchange of ideas between the condensed matter and atomic, molecular, optical-quantum optics communities. This review gives a pedagogical introduction to the physics of quantum noise and its connections to quantum measurement and quantum amplification. After introducing quantum noise spectra and methods for their detection, the basics of weak continuous measurements are…