Social Sciences
drorzel | December 17, 2009
slacktivist: Preferring nightmares
"What I don't get is the kind of deliberate delusion in which a person chooses to pretend the world is more horrifying and filled with more and more-monstrous monsters. Why would anyone prefer such a place to the real world? Why would anyone wish for a world filled with socialist conspiracies, secret Muslim atheists, Satan-worshipping pop stars and bloodthirsty baby-killers?
But the Tea Partiers cling to these nightmares with a desperate ferocity. They get angrily defensive at the suggestion that this world isn't actually as horrific as they're pretending…
palmd | December 16, 2009Oral Robers, a man infamous for his televangelism and faith healing, died yesterday. The coverage of his life helps remind me why I'm a skeptic. There are many wonderful skeptical bloggers out there---I'm not one of them. Sure, I aim a skeptical pen at improbable medical claims, but my posts aren't dripping with skepticism in the same way some of my favorite blogs are. But from time to time, it's good to remember why skepticism is a very good way to approach the world.
Oral Roberts was a scam artist. He built an evangelical empire on the wallets of his victims. He famously told his…
clock | December 16, 2009There are 25 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
The Secret Life of Oilbirds: New Insights into the Movement Ecology of a Unique Avian Frugivore:
Steatornis caripensis (the oilbird) is a very unusual bird. It supposedly never sees daylight, roosting in…
jdupuis | December 15, 2009A selection of articles from two recent IEEE publications which have special issues devoted to humanitarian service in engineering. Note that most of these articles will be behind the IEEE paywall.
IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, v52i4.
The Role of Information and Communication in the Context of Humanitarian Service by Haselkorn, M; Walton, R
Adapting to Change: Becoming a Learning Organization as a Relief and Development Agency by Smith, S.; Young, A.
Listening as a Missing Dimension in Engineering Education: Implications for Sustainable Community Development Efforts by…
gregladen | December 15, 2009Alternate titles for this post:
"It turns out, it is a little like a priesthood."
"Join us. Join us. Join us. Braaainzzzzz"
"Imma gonna let you finish, but first I think you need to get your Wellies wet."
...
In a library, there is a spatial relationship between knowledge and books or journals, and there is a sense of completeness about it. I'm thinking in particular of the Tozzer library, one I spent a fair amount of time in. I would go to the basement of the library and the entire ancient world (this is an anthropology library) was arrayed in a set of shelves to the left. There were…
pharyngula | December 15, 2009I am often chided by morons.
Consistent
Dear Mr. Myers,
To be wrong is always acceptable, because we are human. But, to be consistently wrong, especially when you call yourself a Professor, is going way beyond the bounds of good sense. Anyone who even gives ear to people such as Dawkins and Kitchens is no less than a fool. There is nothing wrong with being a fool, but teaching others to be one is unacceptable and irresponsible, at the very least. Furthermore, to have a degree or degrees in biology and to still believe in Darwinian theory, shows ignorance in the worst degree. Macro…
thusspakezuska | December 14, 2009Is the current economy making more people want to participate in human research studies, asks Isis?
In this new study here at MRU, we began advertising online last Wednesday. By Friday, my study coordinator had received 300 responses...I can't help but wonder if the current poor economy is driving more people to consider human research.
Probably - I wouldn't be at all surprised. It seems possible to me, though, that is just an exacerbation of the situation that obtained previously - which is that poorer people have always been attracted to participation in clinical research trials either…
khannula | December 13, 2009I had a weird experience dealing with journals and peer review a little while ago. Recent discussions of the CRU e-mail hack (especially Janet's) has made me think more about it, and wonder about how the scientific community ought to think about expertise when it comes to peer review.
A little while ago, I was asked to be a reviewer for a journal article. That's a more common experience for people at research universities than for someone like me, but it's still something that's part of my job. I turned down the request because I didn't feel qualified to review the paper. That wouldn't have…
edyong | December 13, 2009There's a great octopus story coming your way tomorrow. For that reason, I thought it was about time to republish this - the first ever post I wrote for Not Exactly Rocket Science, about the ever-amazing mimic octopus. This article was a game-changer for me. I submitted it to the Daily Telegraph's Young Science Writer competition in 2004, while still struggling with a failing attempt at research. It was awarded a runner-up prize - not a win, but enough to convince me that I could actually write and that I enjoyed it. Looking back on it now, it's decent but a bit rough. It also took forever to…
clock | December 12, 2009
Continuing with the introductions to the sessions on the Program, here is what will happen on Saturday, January 16th at 4:30 - 5:35pm:
A. Online Reference Managers - John Dupuis and Christina Pikas moderating, with Kevin Emamy, Jason Hoyt, Trevor Owens and Michael Habib (Scopus) in the 'hot seats'.
Description: Reference managers, sometimes called citation managers or bibliography managers, help you keep, organize, and re-use citation information. A few years ago, the options were limited to expensive proprietary desktop clients or BibTeX for people writing in LaTeX. Now we've got lots of…
sastyk | December 10, 2009The IEA has pretty much conceeded peak oil, announcing that growth to meet demand in the coming decades will come from entirely mythical sources. Ok, they didn't say that, what they said in the latest World Energy Outlook was that the majority of oil production by 2030 will be coming from "fields yet to be developed or found." But what that means is "we're hoping someone with magic powers will come and reverse the long-stand trend towards decline in oil discovery." Because we know that oil discovery peaked in 1964 and has been declining ever since, so that we are consuming oil five times…
illconsidered | December 9, 2009The Guardian has run a front page editorial on the Copenhagen summit along with 56 papers in 20 languages.
I read it at Real Climate who "takes no formal position" on its statements. I suppose it is to avoid the acusation of being political...
Well, I have rarely read an editorial I agree with more. And I say that with the utmost formality!
It was released under Creative Commons license, so I will reproduce it here in its entirety:
Copenhagen climate change conference: Fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation
Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step…
palmd | December 7, 2009A common theme in alternative medicine is the "One True Cause of All Disease". Aside from the pitiable naivete, it's implausible that "acidic diet", liver flukes, colonic debris, the Lyme spirochete, or any other problem---real or imagined---can cause "all disease" (in addition to the fact that most of these ideas are intrinsically mutually exclusive).
One of the popular new ideas in this category is that of "endocrine disrupting chemicals" (EDCs). These are chemicals in the environment that physiologically or chemically mimic naturally occurring human hormones. That some environmental…
cpikas | December 4, 2009In a recent post on openness and sharing in chemistry, I briefly touched on proximity to industry. This is actually somewhat nuanced and a few research studies have looked into it.
As I mentioned Birnholtz, in his dissertation [1] and subsequent JASIST article [2] describes proximity to industry as both/either being funded by a commercial or industrial organization and/or "the extent to which there is an interest by researchers or others in commercializing or otherwise profiting financially from research discoveries" (dissertation, p27). There's the myth that the research university gets all…
aardvarchaeology | December 4, 2009[More blog entries about archaeology, history, uppsala, Sweden; arkeologi, historia, idéhistoria, Uppsala.]
Magnus Alkarp defended his PhD thesis in Uppsala on 21 November. I just read the book, and my opinion is that Alkarp definitely deserves his PhD. In fact, I believe that he probably deserves two such degrees: one in the history of ideas for the present book, and one in archaeology for his as yet unpublished gazetteer of archaeological features and known interventions into the earth at Old Uppsala. But his book was accepted as a PhD thesis by the Department of Archaeology in Uppsala,…
jwilbanks | December 3, 2009My last posts on why I don't like the open source metaphor for science have generated a lot of good comments, here and in my email, twitter, and in person.
They've forced me to think about what exactly it is about the meme that makes me so uncomfortable, and raised some good objections and points. I'm going to try to chew through a few of them in this post and then ditch the topic for a while, as I've got a lot of complaining to do about publishing and data and those topics have had to take a back seat for a few weeks while I worked this through my system.
On a side note, I actually kinda…
dsalo | November 30, 2009Some people watch football over Thanksgiving weekend; I get into discussions of disciplinary data regimes with fellow SciBling Christina and others on FriendFeed. Judge me if you must!
Another common truism in both the repository and data-management fields is that disciplinary affiliation accounts for a lot of the variation in observed researcher behavior. For once, I have no quarrel with the truism; it is unassailably the case. The wise data curator, then, knows some things about disciplinary practices going in.
But what things, exactly?
I don't believe that taxonomy exists yet; it'd be an…
gregladen | November 30, 2009The question of pacifiers (and for that matter bottles) arises when there is a new baby. In the case of Huxley, he will be breast milk fed if possible, but that involves bottle feeding at some point. Also, since our society does not practice cross nursing all Western babies go through a risk period when they begin to starve while the mother's milk is not yet in. Sometimes that is a couple of days, sometimes longer.
In any event, the question comes up, do you let a baby anywhere near a nipple that is not attached to a human breast, and a related question is do you use a pacifier if the…
pharyngula | November 25, 2009Want another reason to avoid debating creationists? It's like giving a mangy, limping, scab-encrusted starving fleabait cat a saucer of milk — you'll never be rid of the whimpering dependent. Ross Olson of the Twin Cities Creation Science Association has taken to pestering me and Mark Borrello with his plaintive demands, and unfortunately I can't just stuff him into a carrier and drag him down to the humane society or the vet.
Here's his latest missive. He cuts right to the chase and Godwins with the very first word.
Hitler
Dr. Myers,
The most emotional audience response in the debate came…
hrynyshyn | November 25, 2009Well, that headline's a little unfair. I wrote it to lure in those who jump on every opportunity to prove that climatologists are frauds. What I really mean to say is: "Where the most recent assessment by the IPCC has been superceded by more recent findings.
It's all in a new report, The Copenhagen Diagnosis, assembled by some of the top people in the field. Here's the executive summary:
Surging greenhouse gas emissions: Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in 2008 were nearly 40% higher than those in 1990. Even if global emission rates are stabilized at present -day levels, just…