Social Sciences
terrasig | February 9, 2010Thank you for visiting our introductory post on K2 Spice and welcome readers from Maia Szalavitz at the TIME Healthland blog. The comments to which she refers can be seen by scrolling to the end of the post.
However, our blog has moved since this was posted in Feb 2010 and any further comments are closed. But if you wish to share any experiences and participate in further discussion, please visit us at our new home here.
If you're interested in our other posts on K2 Spice or other legal highs, click here.
Finally, if you're interested in our comments on Purdue University chemist and…
jstemwedel | February 9, 2010Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session's wiki page.)
The session was led by John McKay and Eric Michael Johnson. John posted the text of his presentation and Eric posted his presentation a la YouTube. I'm going to take this as permission to skip doing a proper recap here. Instead, I'm going to write about the big ideas this session raised for me.
First, I'm struck by how easy it is for those of us who were trained to do science to know very little about where scientific practices come from --…
gregladen | February 8, 2010Perhaps not what you'd think.
This is not about appeasement. It is about not being a racist slob.
Imagine a firing squad run by a relatively benevolent government (that happens to have not yet gotten rid of the death penalty). The squad consist of a dozen soldiers assigned to the duty. While most soldiers accept the assignment to the firing squad out of a sense of duty and a general cultural belief that it is appropriate, it is possible but unusual to object and get out of it. So there is a modicum of personal reflection involved. A soldier asked to join the firing squad considers the…
pharyngula | February 8, 2010I left Morris on the 19th of January, and finally, here it is the 8th of February and I finally made it back. Now leave me alone. I get a moment to rest, don't I? That bottle of Irish whiskey I was given in Galway will help.
OK, moment over. Next up: I get to go the the University of Northern Iowa on Wednesday! Don't say it, I know I'm insane. Anyway, it'll be an evo-devo talk in the Maucker Union, Hemisphere Lounge, at 7pm. There won't be much creationist bashing, but I'll probably spend a few minutes bashing Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini and Mary Midgley, because they're…
jstemwedel | February 8, 2010Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session's wiki page.)
This was sort of an odd session for me -- not so much because of the topics taken up by session leaders Tamara Krinsky and Jennifer Ouellette, but because of my own sense of ambivalence about a lot of "entertainment" these days.
The session itself had lots of interesting glimpses of the work scientists are doing to help support filmmakers (and television producers, and game designers, and producers of other kinds of entertainment) who want to…
cwilcox | February 7, 2010Think of something wonderful - something someone said to you that made your day, or the happiest moment you can remember. Go ahead, take a moment. Now, what are you doing? Odds are, you're smiling.
It takes 12 different muscles in our faces to produce the easily-recognized expression. But smiling is far from a tough feat for our facial muscles. Smiles are so hard-wired into the human condition that babies have been known to smile before birth. Smiling is as instinctual to us as breathing.
Why do we smile? In part, smiling is a social action. We smile to let others know how we feel. Facial…
tfk | February 5, 2010This week put to rest a significant part of the anti-vaccine movement's claim to scientific legitimacy. A paper purporting to show a link between the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine and autism rates was retracted by The Lancet. The journal, which published the 1998 paper, based the decision on a finding by a British medical panel that one author (Andrew Wakefield) had violated certain human experimentation regulations and had misreported how the data was gathered. As Chris Mooney observes, this follows a string of other reviews of the paper which found its conclusions unwarranted by…
jstemwedel | February 4, 2010Remember "ClimateGate", that well-publicized storm of controversy that erupted when numerous email messages from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) webserver at the University of East Anglia were stolen by hackers and widely distributed? One of the events set in motion by ClimateGate was a formal inquiry concerning allegations of research conduct against Dr. Michael E. Mann, a professor in the Department of Meteorology at The Pennsylvania State University.
The report (PDF) from that inquiry has been released, so we're going to have a look at it here.
This report contains a lot of discussion of…
palmd | February 3, 2010I'm heartened by the discussions of medical ethics arising out of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. From reading and listening to interviews with writer Rebecca Skloot, and from my brief conversations with her, I know that medical ethics were very much on her mind during the ten years it took her to create the book. If you read the book, you will see that she was also very concerned that she not be just another exploiter of the Lacks family. That's one reason comments such as this one are disturbing----and at the same time not really disturbing at all. It helps to highlight the amount…
awild | February 3, 2010...are at it again:
The twilight zone:
ambient light levels trigger activity in primitive ants
What's unfortunate about this title is that the judgement "primitive" has nothing to do with the research. It is unnecessary. The study is about how one species of ant uses ambient light levels to trigger foraging. It's a nicely done bit of work. But whether or not these ants are "primitive" has zilch to do with the science.
Back in the day, western anthropologists would study Primitive Culture. Such terms are no longer used in that field, and for good reason. It's not just that labeling other…
pharyngula | February 2, 2010Go sign this petition, too: it asks Obama to recognize Darwin Day on 12 February. Who knows, he might be willing!
A Proclamation
Charles Darwin was the first to propose the scientific theory of evolution by natural selection. On Darwin Day, celebrated on the anniversary of Darwin's birth on February 12, 1809, we celebrate the life and discoveries of Charles Darwin and express gratitude for the enormous benefits that scientific knowledge, acquired through human curiosity and ingenuity, has contributed to the advancement of humanity.
It is sobering to imagine where the human race would be…
sastyk | February 2, 2010I've got a couple of speaking engagements and another class coming up, and I thought I'd let you know where I'm going to be and when.
First, on Saturday, March 6, I'll be in Concord, NH at the NOFA-NH Winter Conference. The Northeast Organic Farming Association has been so powerful in creating conditions for small scale organic agriculture in our region that I'm thrilled to be doing the keynote for this conference. I'll be speaking mid-day on "Making a Place at the Table" and doing a workshop in the afternoon on low energy living with kids and teens. And I can't wait to attend other…
mikethemadbiologist | February 2, 2010As someone who is Jewish, and thus at an elevated risk for Tay-Sachs disease, a degenerative disease that inevitably kills small children, and does so miserably, I appreciate the need for genetic screening. So, while it's not perfect, I think companies like Counsyl that are selling screening for harmful genetic diseases are providing a useful service (although many conditions will still be missed). Nonetheless, their stated marketing pitch is missing something. Can you figure out what it is?
From The NY Times:
The company, Counsyl, is selling a test that it says can tell couples whether…
pharyngula | February 2, 2010The Global Atheist Convention is now officially sold out. If you want to get in, you'll have to find a scalper.
I am still surprised at how oblivious some commentary on the convention can be. Some people can't imagine what we could have to talk about without any gods in the room.
But, if the atheists who post on this blog are to be believed, they have nothing in common with each other except a lack of belief in "imaginary friends". They stand for nothing together, hold no ethical precepts in common, hold no ambitions in common (except, perhaps, a desire to see a religionless world). So what…
emjohnson | February 1, 2010 Image: Gideon Mendel / The GuardianJournalist William Fisher of the Inter Press Service News Agency has just used my recent work on Haiti for his story on the need for transparency and equality in the development aid that the West provides to Haiti:
Journalist Eric Michael Johnson, writing in The Huffington Post, notes that "Haiti has a historically unhealthy dependence on foreign commerce and finance, from the colonial days of the sugar trade to the current assistance provided by developed countries."
"Now the same politicians and financial elites that helped create this mess are…
sastyk | February 1, 2010At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above the snow...
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache'...
The sun was coming from outside.
That scrawny cry - It was
A choristoer whose C predeeded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality. - Wallace…
sastyk | January 31, 2010In 2005, my first widely republished article was entitled "Peak Oil is a Women's Issue" and detailed the ways that material realities for women were likely to change in an energy depleted world. I got more than a 100 emails after I wrote that piece, mostly falling into two camps - either "Wow, I never thought of that, but of course it is" and "Oh, I've been worrying about these issues for a long time and no one ever writes about them." I was not the first significant woman writer in the peak oil movement, nor was I even the first to ever write about these issues, but somehow this article…
pharyngula | January 30, 2010I had a nice break for about 14 hours — I arrived in Minneapolis, and my wife showed up with her massage table (there's a reason she is the Trophy Wife™), but now I have to get on a series of planes to arrive after a series of stops in exotic Dublin, where I shall somehow find my way to someplace to stay for a day or so before giving a talk to the University College Dublin humanists. It should be fine, even if I am stumbling about a bit with uncertainty about where I'm going — the Irish are a hospitable people, and if nothing else, I can always find a pub.
Everyone uses that picture Larry…
drorzel | January 30, 2010
The Mid-Majority : Assistant Palestra Custodian for a Day
"I presented my credentials. "I'm non-union, I work hard and I work for free," I told Dan. Usually, that gets me in the door every time. But not here.
"Well, you'd better be pro-union," Dan replied.
I assured him that my profession had no real national union, much less anything resembling a professional certification process. Besides, I said, I have friends who are high up in the Steelworkers. And that was good enough for Dan Harrell.
I was about to take on the greatest temp job I've ever had in my whole entire life: assistant…
razib | January 29, 2010A comment below prompted me to slap together a post quickly displaying some data which illustrates just how religious South Asians are compared to East Asians. Anyone with an interest in world history will not be surprised by this assertion. When reading surveys of East Asian history I would occasionally reach a chapter titled "Religion," and the author would offer a quick explanation and apologia for why the topic was not given pride of place. By contrast, some have argued to a first approximation South Asian history is a history of South Asian religion. (Though I do not focus on that issue…