Social Sciences
drorzel | September 23, 2009
Infinite Summer » Blog Archive » Summer's End Roundtable, Part I
"How about that ending, huh? "
(tags: books literature blogs infinite-summer)
US LHC Blog » Relationships in Physics Graduate School
"Doing a quick poll of graduate students in our department showed the following:
* Atomic Physics: 5/10 grad students are married (2 of those have kids)
* Particle Physics (CMS group): 1/10 grad students are married (none of those have kids)"
(tags: science physics atoms particles silly academia)
Physics Buzz: Is a Nobel laureate smarter than a fifth grader?
"George Smoot, a UC…
gregladen | September 22, 2009Dario Ringach used animals in his research in neuroscience. When extremist animal rights activists tried to blow up his house in 2006, and accidentally almost blew up the wrong person's house (in characteristic fashion, they got the address wrong, and the bomb did not function) Ringach got spooked and quit using the animals. Recently, Ringach has been speaking out regarding this issue, and the current Nature News has a write up.
After three years of keeping a low profile, Ringach is now trying to raise public support for the use of animals in research. This month, he published a commentary…
hrynyshyn | September 22, 2009Don't be SUCH a scientist
by Randy Olson
195 pages, Island Press
In my review last year of Randy Olson's 2008 film, Sizzle, I wrote that I wanted to like it. I'm exactly the kind of viewer who will eat up anything a marine biologist has to say about communicating science and climate change. But I didn't. Though it was billed as a comedic mockumentary, I found the laughs too few and the central message a tad condescending.
When I found Olson's latest effort to tackle the challenge of communicating science, this time in the medium of short book, I still wanted to like it. This time, I did.…
pharyngula | September 22, 2009The results of yet another poll are out, showing that the godless are rising and promise to rise for years to come. In 1990, we made up 8% of the population; now in 2009, we're 15%. They're extrapolating forward and estimating that we will make up 25% of the country in 20 years.
It's not enough, is all I can say. I suppose it's good news, but I am disappointed in my fellow Americans. I will not be content until the number is 100%. (OK, 95%. It's not fair to demand rationality from people who are brain damaged or locked up in asylums.)
The really bizarre news here is the way people are…
gregladen | September 21, 2009This is yet another in a series of posts on falsehoods. To refresh your memory, a falsehood is a belief held by a number of people that is in some way incorrect. That incorrectness may be blatant, it may be subtle, it may be conditional, it may be simple, it may be complex. But, the unraveling of the falshoodosity of the belief is a learning experience, if it is accomplished in a thoughtful manner and without too much sophistry. In order for a falsehood to "work" as a learning opportunity it is important to define the statement in terms of the thoughts the falsehood invokes in the target…
pharyngula | September 21, 2009The state of Texas is considering striking the name of Neil Armstrong from the social studies standard. I hate to be the voice of restraint here, but I don't think it's as bad as it sounds. The reasoning given is completely bogus (because Armstrong wasn't a scientist? Give me a break), but the action is not unreasonable. The state should not be in the position of dictating the niggling details of instruction — they should be laying down the law on the broad picture of what is taught, but not how it was taught.
So what the curriculum should do is say that the social studies classes for that…
mikethemadbiologist | September 21, 2009And I don't mean that as a compliment. Leon Wieseltier has an excellent response to the NY Times Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati who described the magazine's ideology as:
Call it Urban Modern. That is, I think it reflects not a left-or-right POLITICAL ideology but a geographical one, the mentality of the place it is created: 21st Century Manhattan. So: the Magazine reflects a place where women have professional ambition, where immigrants are welcome, and where gays and lesbians can be themselves (if not marry, yet). The Magazine also reflects a place where being rich is not a bad thing,…
pharyngula | September 19, 2009Print the pledge and ask all your teabagger/libertarian friends and family to sign it!
The Teabagger Socialist-Free Purity Pledge
I, ________________________________, do solemnly swear to uphold the principles of a socialism-free society and heretofore pledge my word that I shall strictly adhere to the following:
I will complain about the destruction of 1st Amendment Rights in this country, while I am duly being allowed to exercise my 1st Amendment Rights.
I will complain about the destruction of my 2ndAmendment Rights in this country, while I am duly >being allowed to exercise my…
emjohnson | September 19, 2009Bonobos often adopt a "missionary" posture during copulation (photograph by Frans de Waal).
As part of the series of reposts leading up to my review of Frans de Waal's newest book The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society I present the second of three pieces that appeared after Ian Parker's 2007 article "Swingers" appeared in The New Yorker.
As I wrote earlier in Bonobo (Re)Visions, Ian Parker's "exposé" in The New Yorker was beautifully written but wrong on many levels. Now the straw man who Parker claims to have torn down, primatologist Frans de Waal, answers his…
emjohnson | September 17, 2009
Darwin evicts a Social Darwinist and Eugenicist from his house / Northwestern Univ.
Primatologist Frans de Waal, author of such classic works as Chimpanzee Politics, Peacemaking Among Primates, Good Natured: The Origin of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, and Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape is now coming out with his new book The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. My review of this work will be out early next week to mark the book's national release on September 22. Today and in the next few days I will be reposting pieces I've written over the years on the…
tetrapodzoology | September 16, 2009
Once again I'm going to recycle an old book review, sorry about that. Have had no internet access at home for the last few days, so things have been difficult here, to say the least (like so many people, I now rely on constant daily internet access for work). Anyway, find below my review of Tidwell & Carpenter's Thunder-Lizards book. The review was published in 2006 so is now rather dated. I haven't changed the text, but please note the following; a full technical paper addressing the neck posture stuff discussed below has since been published (Taylor et al. 2009); titanosaurs no longer…
ddobbs | September 15, 2009OK. Animals first, then everybody else.
(Other) Animals
Want Your Own Dinosaur? Place Your Bids
Jellyfish numbers rise My son and I saw this last year when we were at the EuroScience conference (highly recomennded) in Barcelona (ditto). The beaches had warnings of whole rafts of these. Determined to get wet in the Med, I dipped my toes.
Forget Apple, Here's the Real Snow Leopard
Everybody else
Top soldiers denounce torture.
Earlier Model of Human Brain's Energy Usage Underestimated Its Efficiency Covered heavily, but maybe you missed it.
Alison Bass, whose book "Side Effects" just…
drorzel | September 15, 2009
Fafblog! the whole world's only source for Fafblog.
""Giblets is detached," says Giblets. "Where is the warmth of the heart of the fiery fires of the human experience? Giblets demands more feeling!"
"And though their love was deep and fierce and right and true it was doomed from the start," says me, "for she was only a lowly scullery maid, and he had been trampled to death by elephants.""
(tags: fafblog silly stories blogs)
Pricing the Priceless Class « Easily Distracted
"I think every academic I know agrees that in the last instance, how much it costs to teach in a particular way or to…
cortex | September 13, 2009I've got a new essay on social networks and the research of Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler in the latest issue of Wired:
There's something strange about watching life unfold as a social network. It's easy to forget that every link is a human relationship and every circle a waistline. The messy melodrama of life--all the failed diets and fading friendships--becomes a sterile cartoon.
But that's exactly the point. All that drama obscures a profound truth about human society. By studying Framingham as an interconnected network rather than a mass of individuals, Christakis and Fowler made a…
palmd | September 9, 2009In the latest conversation about placebos, Steve Silberman got a number of things just right, including these converse statements:
Anthracyclines don't require an oncologist with a genial bedside manner to slow the growth of tumors.
...the placebo response has limits. It can ease the discomfort of chemotherapy, but it won't stop the growth of tumors.
Placebo, if it exists as a utile clinical entity (and I'm still not convinced) cannot cure cancer---but chemotherapy can, no matter what hand waving and chanting may or may not accompany it. This goes directly to the concept of "plausibility…
drorzel | September 9, 2009
slacktivist: Same to you, buddy
"A $100 account with no fees costs the bank more in paperwork and tellers' time than it's worth. In the long-run, such accounts can help depositors develop savings habits and savings balances, developing into the sort of customers banks can and do make money from. But neither the executives nor the shareholders of the bank are interested in that kind of long-run -- particularly not when, in the short run, they're losing money on these tiny accounts.
So seeing no incentive to provide such low-balance, no-fee accounts that would allow our young couple to cash…
pharyngula | September 8, 2009A group of prominent Swedes have come out with a manifesto decrying the influence of religion in the world — which is great, but I do wonder why every time I read about famous Swedes, at least one of them has to be a former member of ABBA. It's a fine statement that promotes humanism as the only valid source of morality.
Anyway, a Danish newspaper ran a poll asking if its readers agree. Here it is:
Tolv fremtrædende svenskere blæser i manifest til kamp mod religioner, som de mener fylder alt for meget i samfundet. Er du enig? (Twelve prominent Swedes fan of manifesto to fight against…
aardvarchaeology | September 8, 2009Back in April of 2008 I mused that strictly chronologically speaking, at 36 I was already a mid-career academic since I started working at 20 and retirement age is currently 65. I'm still years from the age when people get academic jobs in my discipline, 41, but anyway.
Yesterday I had two experiences that opened my eyes to the fact that I am now an archaeological dad. By that I mean that there are at least two fields where work I once did is no longer the Stand der Forschung, but where vigorous new studies refer to and build upon my old stuff. I am a member of the parental generation in…
mikethemadbiologist | September 7, 2009In one of his last speeches before Martin Luther King was murdered, he spoke to striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. It seems appropriate for the day:
My dear friends, my dear friend James Lawson, and all of these dedicated and distinguished ministers of the Gospel assembled here tonight, to all of the sanitation workers and their families, and to all of my brothers and sisters, I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be in Memphis tonight, to see you here in such large and enthusiastic numbers...
If you will judge anything here in this struggle, you're commanding…
edyong | September 7, 2009The natural world is rife with leftovers. Over the course of evolution, body parts that no longer benefit their owners eventually waste, away leaving behind shrivelled and useless anatomical remnants. The human tailbone is one such example. Others include the sightless eyes of cavefish that live in total darkness, the tiny spurs on boas and pythons that hint at the legs of their ancestors, and the withered wings of the Galapagos cormorant, an animal that dispensed with flight on an island bereft of land predators.
Animal genomes contain similar remains. Just like organs, genes also waste…