Social Sciences
drorzel | November 25, 2009
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Teaching Governance
"As an administrator, I'm constantly struck by the unacknowledged contradiction among many faculty between "consult us in all things" and "back off and leave us alone." It's not that I don't understand the impulse; depending on local practice, 'service' may or may not count for tenure or promotion. If it doesn't, then the duck-and-cover approach makes short-term sense. Certainly, anybody who has put in time in contentious meetings (hi!) can attest that they can be draining, that you'll sometimes see people at their worst, and that…
edyong | November 24, 2009For the pipefish (and their relatives, seahorses and sea dragons), it's the males who get pregnant. After a male fertilises the female's eggs, he takes them up into a special brood pouch and shelters them until the babies hatch from his pot-bellied stomach several weeks later. He may seem like a shoe-in for the Dad-of-the-year award but this fatherly commitment has a sinister side to it. Not all of the babies he cares for make it out of his stomach alive.
Gry Sagebakken from the University of Gothenburg has proved that pregnant male pipefishes absorb some of the eggs and embryos within…
oracknows | November 22, 2009There are times when I look back, and I can't believe I've been at it this long. It's not just the blogging, the fifth anniversary of which is rapidly approaching for me. Hard as it is to believe, not only have I become a "venerable" medical and skeptical blogger, but there are actually a lot of people who like to read what I regularly lay down. It's not false humility when I say I'm still shocked when I contemplate that. However, when you add to the blogging my time on that Internet wilderness known as Usenet, I've been fighting the good fight against pseudoscience for close to 12 years now…
palmd | November 21, 2009Opponents of science-based medicine like to accuse the rest of us of failing to be "holisitc", of failing to see the whole individual who comes to us for health care. I've argued many times that this is not only wrong, but that so-called alternative docs, by recommending unproven treatments and giving false hope are actually harming their patients. The new USPSTF mammogram recommendations are likely to fuel this debate as well as the one regarding health care reform and rationing. There's already been a great deal of debate new mammogram recommendations, most of it good. For a comprehensive…
oracknows | November 19, 2009I knew when I first heard about them that the new United States Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommendations on breast cancer screening would be controversial. I tried to discuss these guidelines and the issues involved in a calm and rational way, relatively devoid of Insolence, Respectful or not-so-Respectful, yesterday, pointing out that screening guidelines were clearly due for revision but also recognizing the problems with the USPSTF recommendations and valid criticisms of them. In the end, I concluded that, among the critics, the ASCO discussion of the proposed guidelines…
razib | November 18, 2009In the post below I pointed to an article which claimed:
It's hard to say exactly how much support the theory of evolution enjoys in the world's Muslim countries, but it's definitely not very much. In one 2006 study by American political scientists, people in 34 industrial nations were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the idea that human beings evolved from earlier life forms. Turkey, the only Muslim country in the survey, showed the lowest levels of support - barely a quarter of Turks said they agreed. By comparison, at least 80 percent of those surveyed in Iceland, Denmark,…
razib | November 16, 2009This discussion between Michael Specter & Chris Mooney pointed me to an interesting new book, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives. Instead of Global Warming or Creationism, Specter addresses less pervasively disputatious issues such as genetically modified food, the anti-vaccination movement and the politics of the FDA approval process (at least judging from the discussion). Mooney & Specter also point to the reality that denialism exists in Blue America (though anyone who has followed the dabbling of the Huffington…
revere | November 15, 2009Any article entitled "On swine-flu conspiracy theories" should have an automatic warning label, but the one noted below, in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail is really terrific (h/t ML). Conspiracy theories are all over the internet and they even show up here in the comments from time to time, but I'm glad to say our readership is saner than some. Like scientific theories, conspiracy theories aren't hard to formulate (humans being an inventive and imaginative species), but like good science, conspiracies aren't so easy to implement. It's not that conspiracies don't exist, the…
esiegel | November 14, 2009But I want you to know something... you and me, it's not gonna be a one-way street. 'Cause I don't believe in one-way streets. Not between people, and not while I'm driving. So, here's some advice I wish I woulda got when I was your age: Live every week like it's Shark Week. -Tracy Jordan, 30 Rock
And, much like Tracy, the song for you this week is simple, sweet, and good-hearted. Enjoy an old classic, Just the Two of Us by Grover Washington, Jr., and Bill Withers.
Many of you have asked about whether there were any good science programs on television, and I have found one for you. Starting…
terrasig | November 13, 2009Twenty years ago this morning, I had to defend a body of work that contained this paragraph on page 24:
HeLa cells are a human cervical carcinoma cell line having a doubling time of 24 hr and were obtained from Dr. Bert Flanegan, Dept. of Immunology and Microbiology, University of Florida. HeLa cells were maintained as subconfluent monolayer cultures in minimal essential media (alpha modification; GIBCO) with 10% fetal bovine serum (GIBCO) at 37° under a humidified atmosphere containing 5% CO2. Cells were maintained in logarithmic growth by subculturing every other day using 0.05% trypsin/0.…
dgmacarthur | November 11, 2009Medland et al. (2009). Common Variants in the Trichohyalin Gene Are Associated with Straight Hair in Europeans. The American Journal of Human Genetics DOI: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2009.10.009
A couple of weeks ago I reported on a presentation by 23andMe's Nick Eriksson at the American Society of Human Genetics meeting in Honolulu, in which Eriksson presented data on a series of genome-wide association studies performed by the company using genetic and trait data from its customers.
Along with genetic analysis of a variety of other traits (such as asparagus anosmia and photic sneeze) Eriksson…
tetrapodzoology | November 11, 2009Regular readers will know that I'm not exactly a fan of the idea - discussed here and there in the technical (Russell & Séguin 1982, Russell 1987), popular (Hecht 2007, Socha 2008, Naish 2008) and speculative literature (McLoughlin 1984, Magee 1993) - that non-avian theropod dinosaurs might have evolved into humanoids had they not bought the farm 65 million years ago [image below by Matt Collins].
The hypothetical (emphasis: hypothetical) evolution of big brains, intelligence and so on among imaginary post-Cretaceous deinonychosaurs is not (in my opinion) all that unreasonable, and I…
pharyngula | November 9, 2009We're learning a bit more about the fellow who was maced and arrested in Chicago, thanks to the efforts of the Chicago Ethical Humanist Society; members of that group are busily writing to me to let me know the Whole Truth of the incident, and why they were justified in siccing the police on Sunsara Taylor's cameraman. It's weird, though: they keep telling me how bad and awful and wicked this fellow is — his name is Gregory Koger, by the way — but they won't say what he did that justified the police assault on him. And that is dismaying. The ethical society doesn't seem to care much about…
palmd | November 7, 2009I'm told that mathematicians and physicists get a lot of mail from folks with "big discoveries". These discoveries are often of the "Einstein was wrong and I figured out the Theory of Everything" variety. Many of us refer to these folks as "cranks", a catch-all, derogatory term for people who, through their own arrogance and ignorance, think they have, despite little education or work, disproved ideas that have taken lifetimes to assemble.
Enter the anti-vaccination cranks. Immunoprophylaxis---the manipulation of the immune system to prevent disease---is centuries old, and over those…
pharyngula | November 6, 2009The Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago revoked a speaking invitation to Sunsara Taylor, which led to much drama. I've already posted Taylor's version of events; now the society has sent me theirs, so here it is. It just confirms to me that they don't know what they're doing.
We don't know if you know all of what has happened since your letter of support for Ms. Taylor but we wanted to give you the history of all that has transpired. All of the signees of this letter contributed their shared experience to this account.
Our Sunday speakers are chosen by a committee of nine people. Â In…
ddobbs | November 5, 2009
Preston Gannaway, The Virginian-Pilot
When I did my story on the overextension of the PTSD diagnosis in vets (and elsewhere), I found Grossman's take on the psychic toll of killing (and almost being killed) among the most compelling. His "On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society" is a unique and uniquely valuable contribution. Below, part of a story on a recent presentation Grossman (pictured above) gave at a recent Pentagon-sponsored conference on building resilience in warriors.
Dave Grossman puts humans into three categories: Ninety-eight percent are "…
terrasig | November 5, 2009
Some readers may be aware that Rebecca Skloot is about to release her much-anticipated book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a story that is about much more than the black Southern woman whose cervical cancer gave rise to the most famous human cancer cell line. (Crown, 2 Feb 2010, preorder here).
HeLa cells, as they are known, have played a role in the development of vaccines for polio and cervical cancer, the part of last year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Harald zur Hausen, and the PhD thesis 20 years ago of a certain natural products pharmacology blogger.
Having been…
tfk | November 3, 2009Todd Wood is a creationist. He is a professor at Bryan College, named for William Jennings Bryan, who prosecuted John Scopes in 1925. He is, in particular, a professor of baraminology, the creationist notion that his particular Christian God created the "kinds" in the first week, and that by careful measurement, he can identify those "kinds." He thinks the earth is less than 10,000 years old. He thinks evolution is wrong, but he also freely acknowledges that it is the very best scientific knowledge available, and has been on a minor crusade to move other creationists away from the…
emjohnson | November 3, 2009By now everyone has heard of the high school English honors teacher, Dan DeLong, who was suspended for offering students the Seed magazine article "The Gay Animal Kingdom" by Jonah Lehrer as an optional extra credit assignment.
According to the Alton, IL based Telegraph newspaper, DeLong has now been reinstated at Southwestern High School after several hundred students and parents attended a six-hour long disciplinary hearing:
At Monday night's meeting, more than 200 people lined the stairs, sidewalk and office space at the district's small unit office at 884 Piasa Road in the Macoupin…
pharyngula | November 3, 2009The Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago has done an incredibly stupid thing. They invited Sunsara Taylor to give a talk on "Morality Without God"…and then disinvited her. The reasons weren't clear, other than that some people in the society disliked her politics — she's a communist — and the group caved and cancelled her speaking engagement a short two weeks before it was to happen.
Basically, the ethical society was unethical. You just don't do that. But then they made it worse.
They've been stonewalling. No explanations, no apologies, nothing — they might as well admit that they're feeling…