Social Sciences
worldsfair | June 10, 2009
Science Scout Twitter feed
(Originally from here)
Dear Mr. Superman, Mr. Batman, Ms. Wonder Woman, and other esteemed do-gooders,
Although I have been waiting patiently for a few years in the hope that an advertisement would appear, I feel for the sake of my career that now is a good time to approach you. In essence, I am wondering whether you are, or will be, accepting any new members into your fine organization. More specifically, I am inquiring as to whether you need the services of a geneticist, since that is my particular field of expertise.
Part of the reason I am contacting you now…
oracknows | June 8, 2009Vaccines have saved more lives and prevented more suffering than any medical invention ever conceived by humans. However, to be most effective, a large enough fraction of the population to produce herd immunity needs to be immunized. When the herd immunity threshold is reached, then the chances of anyone carrying a microorganism to cause disease drops, leaving no reservoir of infectious agent to facilitate disease spread. The end result is that the unvaccinated are also protected, which is important for children who can't be vaccinated because they are either too young, have a medical…
pharyngula | June 8, 2009Minnesota has more than a few local conservative wingnuts; there are a few very popular blogs emanating from these parts to testify that, and in addition, the major metropolitan newspaper, the Star Tribune, has a shrill blitherer they regularly put front and center who has most of us scratching our heads in wonder that they keep such an incompetent hack on the staff. All the Minnesotan readers here know already who I'm talking about, and I don't even need to mention her name…but for all of you lucky out-of-staters, I'll fill you in: it's Katherine Kersten. "Who?", you all say, and that's…
cpikas | June 6, 2009This post serves a few purposes. First,
href="http://friendfeed.com/billhooker/ffbe5e1d/secret-science-again-drugmonkey">
Bill Hooker questioned
href="http://scienceblogs.com/drugmonkey/2009/06/secret_science_again.php#comment-1680220">Crotty's
assertion about the importance of patents to university
researchers [*]. Bill also
href="http://www.sennoma.net/main/archives/2009/06/what_use_are_research_patents.php">posted
a nice summary of AUTM's statistics (later in
href="http://scienceblogs.com/drugmonkey/2009/06/secret_science_again.php">DrugMonkey's
comment stream there…
jrosenhouse | June 5, 2009Chris Mooney has posted his latest salvo in his ongoing discussion with Jerry Coyne. Sadly, I think he has muffed it pretty badly.
Coyne, of course, can take care of himself. I am inserting myself into this discussion simply because I think this is an important and interesting topic. So let's have a look.
The trouble starts early in Mooney's post when he writes:
I believe the central reason we have such massive problems with the teaching of evolution to be precisely this--millions of America believe, incorrectly, that they must give up their faith in order to learn about it or accept it.…
grrlscientist | June 4, 2009
Who: journalist and author, Nina Burleigh
What: free public presentation, "Biblical Forgery"
Where: SLC Conference Center, 352 7th avenue (between 29th and 30th streets), 16th floor, room D4
When: Thursday, 4 June 700-830pm
Join CFI and the Secular Humanist Society of New York to meet journalist and author Nina Burleigh, who wrote the recently published book, Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed, & Forgery in the Holy Land. Her book tells the story of the unraveling of a Bible relic forgery scheme in Israel, and gives a glimpse into the intriguing world of biblical archaeology…
oracknows | June 4, 2009I've warned time and time again what the price will be if the Jenny McCarthy and her fellow arrogantly ignorant band of vaccine "skeptics" continue to get more and more traction. So have many others. It is true that, for the moment, vaccination rates overall remain high in the U.S., but there are numerous troubling signs that the propaganda being spread by Generation Rescue and the anti-vaccine movement is having an effect, with outbreaks of vaccine-preventble diseases popping up in areas with high levels of "philosophical" exemptions. In such areas, vaccination rates can easily fall well…
grrlscientist | June 3, 2009
Who: journalist and author, Nina Burleigh
What: free public presentation, Biblical Forgery
Where: SLC Conference Center, 352 7th avenue (between 29th and 30th streets), 16th floor, room D4
When: Thursday, 4 June 700-830pm
Join CFI and the Secular Humanist Society of New York to meet journalist and author Nina Burleigh, who wrote the recently published book, Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed, & Forgery in the Holy Land. Her book tells the story of the unraveling of a Bible relic forgery scheme in Israel, and gives a glimpse into the intriguing world of biblical archaeology…
aardvarchaeology | June 3, 2009Sweden's secularisation process has been going on for about a century, usually pretty quietly, with the anti-Christian polemics of philosopher Ingemar Hedenius marking a brief period of open conflict in the 1950s.
As is the case in most European countries, Sweden's university system was born in the Middle Ages with the main aim to educate priests. Some of the older ones still have a Faculty of Theology. The other day another one of the National Agency for Higher Education's evaluations was published. They recently checked out the country's archaeology departments. Now they've done religion…
grrlscientist | June 3, 2009tags: Humane Society of the United States, HSUS, H$U$, cloning food, terrorism, animals, pets, false advertising, streaming video
I have followed this video as it has been removed from YouTube and been suppressed several times due to legal bullying by the activist and terrorist organization, the Humane Society of the United States (H$U$). This investigative report, which appeared a couple weeks ago on WSB TV [channel 2 in Atlanta], reveals that H$U$ uses misinformation to trick the public into thinking they are donating funds to build local shelters for homeless pets, and to help rescue pets…
cpikas | June 2, 2009Is that all our vendors hear when they ask us to try out their new
interfaces? A couple of us were kvetching on friendfeed about
this.
Lemme tell you a little story. A little while ago a really
important society publisher in the geosciences re-did all of their web
pages and they were pretty - jewel tones (not what I would have chosen,
but pretty none the less). If you had a doi or were using an
open URL resolver, you would go straight to the article and be
satisfied - I pulled a bunch of articles for people this way and didn't
notice. Then one day, probably 6 months after the site had…
gregladen | June 2, 2009This question is shorthand for a larger and more nuanced set of questions that has emerged over the last 24 hours here and here as people engage in this very interesting and important discussion about rape, especially wartime rape and related post-apocalyptic rape cultures.
"The switch" is a term I first heard from a student, who wrote a term paper for me on this in 1993. The basic idea of a switch would be supported if more or less randomly (though age biased, likely) selected men, put into a certain situation, tended to commit rape on a much larger scale ... or more exactly, a much…
jstemwedel | June 2, 2009Yesterday, in my first post about the Silence is the Enemy campaign, I wrote:
Addressing rape directly. From the point of view of ethics, you'd think this would be a very short discussion. It is wrong to commit sexual violence. It is wrong to act out your frustration or your sense of entitlement or your need to feel that there is something in your life that is within your control on the body of another human being. It is wrong to treat a woman or a child (or another man) as less than fully human.
Anyone who would argue otherwise could only be a moral monster. Or thoroughly steeped in a…
tfk | June 1, 2009Medgar Evers was a civil rights activist in Mississippi. Growing up black in a state where dark skin was a crime, he had the courage to stand up for his rights and the rights of his friends and family. He organized boycotts, sued for admission to a segregated law school, and became field secretary for the NAACP.
His house was attacked with Molotov cocktails, but he didn't back down. In Phil Ochs' immortal phrasing, "They tried to burn his home and they beat him to the ground/ But deep inside they both knew what it took to bring him down." And on June 12, 1963, returning home from a…
gregladen | June 1, 2009Expanding on the discussion from here ...
In the paper Anthropology's "Fierce" Yanomami: Narratives of Sexual Politics in the Amazon, Sharon Tiffany and Kathleen Adams provide the following opening passage:
Imagine a society in which one woman in every three is raped, usually by a man she knows, consider the consequences of living in a society where one third of all women are beaten during pregnancy and 35 percent of women using emergency medical facilities are battered . Since wee are anthropologists, readers may mistakenly think that these appalling data were collected in an exotic society…
jstemwedel | June 1, 2009This month, Sheril Kirshenbaum and Dr. Isis are spearheading a blogospheric initiative to call attention to a continuing epidemic of mass rapes in Liberia even six years after the end of its 14 year civil war, and to try to do something about it.
Last month, Nicholas Kristof described the situation in the New York Times, touching on the particular case of a 7-year-old rape survivor named Jackie:
[S]omehow mass rape survived the end of the war; it has been easier to get men to relinquish their guns than their sense of sexual entitlement. So the security guard at Jackie's school, a man in his…
gregladen | June 1, 2009Please read the following vignette of an actual incident.
I am a scientist observing the culture of the Namoyoma people. I am sitting in a shady spot just outside the village, writing up some notes, and I observe a disturbing event. Four men are trying to drag a young woman from the road into the nearby forest, and from what I hear them saying, they intend to rape her. There are also four older women trying to drag the young woman back to the village, and they are yelling that she must go back to her father's house where she will be protected. The battle over this young woman continues…
sciencepunk | May 31, 2009This entry is part of the Science and the European Election series, a collaboration between SciencePunk and the Lay Scientist blog to encourage public discussion of the science policies of the major parties standing at the forthcoming European elections.
It has been said that there are serious incompatibilities between member states on regulations governing stem cell research. How will you work to resolve these differences?
Tim Worstall, UKIP:
We wouldn't work to resolve such differences. The balancing of moral issues involved in something like embryonic stem cell research is properly a…
edyong | May 29, 2009When Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse in 1928, he understood the draw that anthropomorphic mice would have. But even Walt's imagination might have struggled to foresee the events that have just taken place in a German genetics laboratory. There, a group of scientists led by Wolfgang Enard have "humanising" a gene in mice to study its potential relevance for human evolution.
The gene in question is the fascinating FOXP2, which I have written extensively about before, particularly in a feature for New Scientist. FOXP2 was initially identified as the gene behind an inherited disorder that…
drorzel | May 28, 2009
The Washington Monthly
"This is one of the things I love most about blogs: Barack Obama nominates Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court; I, a non-lawyer, wonder what her record is like, and find the summaries in newspapers much too shallow and focussed on the politics of her appointment rather than her record; but voila! SCOTUSBlog has anticipated my every whim by running a series summarizing a whole lot of her decisions."
(tags: blogs law politics US)
David Foster Wallace | Books | A.V. Club
"David Foster Wallace wrote about lots of subjects with lots of strategies, all of them vehement.…