Social Sciences
clock | August 8, 2009
Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 260 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays):
A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a Nurse- a guest post
A Blog Around The Clock: Yes, Archaea also have circadian clocks!
A Blog Around The Clock: Why social insects do not suffer from…
emjohnson | August 7, 2009
For this week's Friday Follow I wanted to highlight two excellent sources for anthropology news and opinion.
Greg Laden's Blog is my go to for informed commentary and daily entertainment. I'm constantly impressed by his prodigious output as well as his thoughtful and informative content. A must read is his recent post on the natural basis for inequality of the sexes:
What is the premise we choose, as a society, to be the basis of our ethical and moral codes, our laws, etc.? For many people, this premise is mutualism. We agree to equality of all individuals (with special exceptions). This…
jrosenhouse | August 7, 2009Time to wrap up my discussion of Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's book Unscientific America. In Part One I focused on the main themes of the book, arguing that it was superficial in its analysis of the issues and that its proposed solutions are impractical and unlikely to be effective. In Part Two I focused specifically on Chapter Eight of the book, which argued against the activites of the New Atheists. I argued that M and K's treatment of the arguments was inadequate, and manifested on a small scale problems that afflicted most of the book.
In this final part of the review I wanted…
clock | August 6, 2009
Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 250 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays):
A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a Nurse- a guest post
A Blog Around The Clock: Yes, Archaea also have circadian clocks!
A Blog Around The Clock: Why social insects do not suffer from…
tlambert | August 5, 2009Australia's CIS (Centre for Independent Studies) has been promoting greenhouse denial and delay for a decade. Last year their "Big Ideas" forum featured some classic denialism from Arthur Herman. This year, on Monday 10 August in Sydney we have:
Enemies of Progress?
Cute title. Maybe I should have used "Enemies of Science?" as the title of this post.
Where humanity once solved the world's problems, we are now viewed as the source. We no longer take pride in dynamic progress to benefit mankind; we bemoan the so-called carbon footprint that this progress will leave.
What? "so-called carbon…
jdupuis | August 5, 2009During my summer blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from July 3, 2007. It's one of the most popular posts I've done, and it was linked quite widely in the science blogosphere. The interview series has lapsed a bit this year, but that's mostly due to a couple of the people I was approaching just not working out. I will definitely relaunch the series in the fall and try to do one every other month or so.
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Welcome to the most recent installment in my occasional series of interviews…
revere | August 4, 2009Of the three main modes of infection for flu -- transmission by large droplets, transmission by tiny suspended aerosols, transmission via inanimate objects (also called fomites) -- it is the last that is the least certain but garners the most attention in the form of hand hygiene, disinfectants and now, fear of magazines and toys in emergency department waiting rooms and acute-care clinics in Canada. Here's the lede from an article in the Montreal-Gazette:
All magazines and toys should be removed from emergency department waiting rooms and acute-care clinics to reduce exposure to human swine…
clock | August 3, 2009
Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 240 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays):
A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a Nurse- a guest post
A Blog Around The Clock: Yes, Archaea also have circadian clocks!
A Blog Around The Clock: Why social insects do not suffer from…
sb admin | August 3, 2009by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
There's a swine flu pandemic well underway and efforts are being made to reconstruct how it started. But almost everyone who has been following this knows it's not the first time a swine flu virus has transmitted from person to person. In 1976 in Fort Dix, New Jersey there were a couple of hundred cases, with 13 hospitalizations and one death from an H1N1 swine flu virus. The public health response was the infamous vaccination campaign that reached 44 million Americans before being ignominiously halted in the face of two facts: the feared swine flu…
revere | August 3, 2009There's a swine flu pandemic well underway and efforts are being made to reconstruct how it started. But almost everyone who has been following this knows it's not the first time a swine flu virus has transmitted from person to person. In 1976 in Fort Dix, New Jersey there were a couple of hundred cases, with 13 hospitalizations and one death from an H1N1 swine flu virus. The public health response was the infamous vaccination campaign that reached 44 million Americans before being ignominiously halted in the face of two facts: the feared swine flu outbreak never got out of Fort Dix; and as a…
clock | July 31, 2009
Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 240 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays):
Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 240 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You…
laelaps | July 30, 2009
A restoration of the head of Pyrotherium. From W.B. Scott's A History of Land Mammals in the Western Hemisphere.
I do not remember much from my elementary school education, but there are a few fragments that have stuck with me. One day in 6th grade geography, for example, Mr. McCutcheon asked the class what we thought the continents of South America and Africa looked like. Africa was easy, it looked like the head of an African elephant (northwestern Africa being the right ear and Madagascar the tip of the trunk), but there was a greater diversity of opinion about South America. The…
clock | July 28, 2009
Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 230 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays):
A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a Nurse- a guest post
A Blog Around The Clock: Yes, Archaea also have circadian clocks!
A Blog Around The Clock: Why social insects do not suffer from…
dsalo | July 28, 2009Another thing I meant to call out in the context of the Jupiter-goes-boom event was the nod to data gathered by people who aren't connected to the formal research enterprise save tangentially.
This event was first noted by someone not an astronomer by profession, and the article notes that this is hardly the first time astronomers have been scooped. My husband, who is an extremely amateur skygazer and likes to hang out on online astronomy bulletin boards, says that his impression is that astronomers mingle with enthusiasts fairly freely, all things considered, and both sides appear to benefit…
emjohnson | July 27, 2009The 40th edition of the Humanist Symposium blog carnival is up at The Evolving Mind. My picks in this edition include:
Daylight Atheism looks at the story of Edward and Joan Downes who decided to die together when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer:
Voluntarily laying down your own life is the ultimate choice of a free individual, the ultimate affirmation that our lives are our own and we may direct them as we wish. However, in the U.K. (and in most of the U.S.), assisted suicide is still illegal - a regrettably irrational view, supported in large part by religious medievalists who want…
drorzel | July 27, 2009
KR Blog » The Wilderness of Memory
"[Chabon asks] a valid question, but I can't escape the feeling that it reflects a particularly American idealization of childhood. Growing up slowly is a privilege of wealth, and few children throughout human history have enjoyed a childhood without the privations of hunger, war, or grinding poverty. "
(tags: books literature society culture history class-war kid-stuff blogs)
Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood - The New York Review of Books
"The thing that strikes me now when I think about the Wilderness of Childhood is the incredible…
clock | July 26, 2009A few years ago, I read Mary Roach's first book, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and absolutely loved it! One of the best popular science books I have read in a long time - informative, eye-opening, thought-provoking and funny. Somehow I missed finding time to read her second (Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife - I guess just not a topic I care much about), but when her third book came out, with such a provocative title as Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, I could not resist.
And I was not disappointed. It is informative, eye-opening, thought-provoking and funny.…
jrosenhouse | July 24, 2009On the subject of science and religion, Karl Giberson and Francis Collins are not among my favorite commentators. That notwithstanding, this interview actually manages to be pretty interesting. Giberson's questions are in bold face, Collins' answers are in regular type.
You seem like a mirror image of the fundamentalists who struggle with this, as I certainly did in college. Fundamentalists like me grow up with a lot of confidence in biblical literalism and then they encounter evolution, so they are bringing their prior biblical commitments to this new problem. You were interpreting the…
emjohnson | July 24, 2009English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679) is widely held as the "father of political science." His 1651 book Leviathan makes the case for why monarchy is the only political system that is consistent with human nature. He bases his argument on the following assumption about humans in "the state of nature" (what we would now call indigenous peoples):
Let us return again to the state of nature, and consider men as if but even now sprung out of the earth, and suddenly, like mushrooms, come to full maturity without all kind of engagement to each other . . . Whatsoever therefore…
clock | July 24, 2009
Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 230 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays):
A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a Nurse- a guest post
A Blog Around The Clock: Yes, Archaea also have circadian clocks!
A Blog Around The Clock: Why social insects do not suffer from…