Social Sciences
tsmith | April 30, 2009I've been seeing a lot of comments mocking the current outbreak of H1N1, and a lot of people (and journalists) who don't understand what "big deal" is about the "snoutbreak" of swine influenza, or don't get what the raising of the World Health Organization's pandemic alert phase up to 5 means. I noted here what the alert level meant, but wanted to discuss it a bit more in a full post; after the jump.
So, some comments I've seen thrown about:
This is all just media hype! Lies about the Mexican cases! The WHO just revised their numbers down to 26 cases and 7 deaths! Why should I believe…
cortex | April 30, 2009There's no way in hell I deserve to be on the stage at this incredible event, but I'm so honored to be included:
Yo-Yo Ma performs the world premiere of Self Comes to Mind, a musical composition by Bruce Adolphe, composer in residence at the Brain and Creativity Institute and resident lecturer of The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, based on an evocative exploration of the evolution of human consciousness written especially for this collaboration by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, Director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at University of Southern California, and author of…
pharyngula | April 29, 2009Oh, no…it's an irresistible magnet. Francis Collins and Karl Giberson, with funding from the Templeton Foundation (who else?), have put together a whole website full of fluffy bunnies and pious weasels to reconcile science and faith. It's a rich vein of the worst of pseudo-scientific apologetics, and I am stunned by it — not because I am impressed by the substance, but because it is such a target-rich environment. Having read both Collins' Language of God, with it's amazing conversion experience that had to have impressed all with its depth and majesty, and the equally wooly-minded Karl…
j7uy5 | April 29, 2009Well, maybe not Malthus, but Garrett Hardin and Paul Ehrlich -- the
1960's-era neomalthusian academicians -- have been right on the
money. There are hard limits to growth, and those limits are
upon
us. This is the contention of Charles A. S. Hall and John W.
Day,
Jr., two systems ecologists who have published a paper in American
Scientist.
The paper is still behind a pay wall at the publication site, but a PDF
copy can be obtained
href="http://www.esf.edu/efb/hall/2009-05Hall0327.pdf">from
Professor
Hall's web site. (HT:
href="http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5330#more">EROI Guy…
oracknows | April 28, 2009I know I've been ragging on The Huffington Post a lot lately. Trust me, I take no great pleasure in doing so. Indeed, more than anything else, it's been a major frustration for me. It's bad enough that HuffPo has been a hotbed of anti-vaccine propaganda and pseudoscience ever since its very inception, continuing through to today. Ditto Deepak Chopra, who has had a home there for at least three years now. But 2009 has been especially bad, adding proponents of distant healing, detox quackery, and, worst of all, the stylings of Kim Evans, a detox maven who thinks that antibiotics cause cancer.…
drorzel | April 27, 2009
Acephalous: Concerning the inherent superiority of printed text to irresponsible online drivel.
"Is it absolutely necessary for the image gracing the cover of the most recent issue of the official mouthpiece of my professional organization to depict something that, when seen on my desk by a colleague from another department, compelled her to ask where a viper fish would even get a detachable penis to whack off against a shrimp-wielding toucan? Do other departments not laugh at us enough already?"
(tags: blogs academia silly art humanities acephalous)
Intimate Homicide | Mother Jones
"I'll…
bioephemera | April 25, 2009
Christmas greeting card, school unknown, circa 1920.
Dittrick Medical History Center
from Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 1880-1930
Slate has an intriguing new review by Barron Lerner of a book called Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 1880-1930, by John Harley Warner and James M. Edmonson. The book delves into the turn-of-the-century practice of photographing medical students with cadavers - photos that today read as weird, grotesque, even offensive.
The photos unearthed by Warner and Edmonson depict an astonishing variety of…
jjacquet | April 23, 2009Back in 2005, I interviewed fisheries biologist Daniel Pauly for a small article on seafood consumer campaigns. This would evolve into the work we do today. I was not able to publish large chunks of the transcripts then, but I am now. I think what Daniel said about average vs. extreme consumers was relevant, particularly in light of the studies on the preference for rare commodities and the recent chow-down on the megamouth shark caught in the Philippines (the 41st megamouth ever found, ever; pictured here).
Here is what Daniel had to say:
The reason why we have giraffes is not because we…
clock | April 23, 2009Sexual Harassment From Males Prevents Female Bonding, Fish Study Shows:
The extent to which sexual harassment from males can damage relationships between females is revealed in a new study. Led by the Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour at the University of Exeter and published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the research uncovers the effect of sexual harassment on the ability of female fish to form social bonds with each other.
Fish Researcher Demonstrates First 'Non-visual Feeding' By African Cichlids:
Most fish rely primarily on their vision to find prey to feed upon, but a…
oracknows | April 22, 2009I'm sure it's obvious that I'm often puzzled (and, I daresay, many other skeptics and boosters of science- and evidence-based medicine are puzzled too) over why various forms of quackery and woo that have either about as close to zero prior probability as one can imagine and/or (more frequently "and") have failed to show evidence of any therapeutic effect greater than that of placebo in clinical trials manage to retain so much traction among the public. Examples abound, for instance homeopathy and reiki, the former of which is nothing more than sympathetic magic prettied up with science-y…
razib | April 21, 2009The New York Times has a story about a new paper, Humans at tropical latitudes produce more females:
Skews in the human sex ratio at birth have captivated scientists for over a century. The accepted average human natal sex ratio is slightly male biased, at 106 males per 100 females or 51.5 per cent males. Studies conducted on a localized scale show that sex ratios deviate from this average in response to a staggering number of social, economical and physiological variables. However, these patterns often prove inconsistent when expanded to other human populations, perhaps because the nature of…
ddobbs | April 20, 2009Earlier today I drew attention to a post by Questionable Authority on The Torture Memos, Medical "Professionals", and the Hippocratic Oath. Says Mike,
I cannot remember ever in my life being as ashamed of my country as I am at this moment. The contents of the memos are so insanely wrong that I'd like to believe that they're fiction, but they're clearly not.
He ends by calling for the AMA to identify the medical professionals involved and help them find new lines of work. A commenter on one of my earlier posts on psychologists, doctors, and torture, T. Hunt, joins him:
While the modern…
bioephemera | April 19, 2009We all know Twitter can be annoying, but is it really evil? During the past week, you may have heard that there is brand-new neuroscientific evidence proving exactly that. But the hype turns out to be just that: hype.
It all started with a press release from USC about an upcoming PNAS paper by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Antonio Damasio, entitled "Neural Correlates of Admiration and Compassion." The USC press release, which was picked up by EurekAlert and other outlets, says:
The finding, contained in one of the first brain studies of inspirational emotions in a field dominated by a focus…
sa smith | April 17, 2009T. Boone Pickens. Never heard of the guy till I moved to OK. Some gazillionare that donates a shitload of money to Oklahoma State in Stillwater.
Now while Pickens seems kinda like a cliche Republican (oil man, Swift Boat contributor, hoarding water), evidently his wife is a PETA nutbar. Oh certainly shes done 'good' things-- donated money to help pets stranded after Katrina, horse rescues-- But Madeleine Pickens is causing OSUs vet school to be under lock-down right now due to bullshit shes been puking to the local media.
So the Pickens donate lots of money to OSU, right? Well Madeleine…
gregladen | April 17, 2009An agreement stating that girls under 18 will not undergo female genital mutilation (FGM) in Sierra Leone was recently signed by village chiefs and other community leaders, including women who perform FGM. The agreement affects the Kambia district, which is in the northernwestern part of the country.
At puberty, the majority of girls in Sierra Leone are initiated into the Bondo Society, a secret society of women that uses circumcision to initiate new members abducted the women. Gloria Bella, of Sierra Leone's Human Rights Commission, told IRIN, "community leaders feel that [initiation] is…
jrosenhouse | April 17, 2009The article by Julian Baggini disucssed in yesterday's blog post was a reply of sorts to this article by Madeleine Bunting. She starts with some encouraging words:
This is Holy Week. It started yesterday with Palm Sunday and continues through Holy Thursday, Good Friday and culminates this Sunday with Easter Day. One can no longer assume most people will be aware of this, let alone the events these days mark; in a recent UK poll, only 22% could identify what Easter was celebrating. What other system of belief has collapsed at such spectacular speed as British Christianity? One can only…
dgmacarthur | April 16, 2009The latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine has four excellent and thought-provoking articles on the recent revolution in the genetics of common disease and its implications for personalised medicine and personal genomics. Razib and Misha Angrist have already commented, and there's also a thorough lay summary by Nick Wade in the NY Times.
The scene is set by a brief but useful review of progress in genome-wide studies of human disease, which is worth reading if you need to get yourself up to speed on the scope of progress in modern disease genomics. The main course, however, is…
apalazzo | April 15, 2009This is an attempt to get back into blog-writing mode. My time has become split in a thousand different ways. There are a multitude of items that need to be accomplished before I leave for Toronto.
Here's a few of them: I would like to wrap up three ongoing projects, or at least get most of the lab work done. I need to find a place to live in my hometown-to-be. I need to set up the lab-to-be. I need to set up my new lab website, to attract students and postdocs. I need to plan ahead for the next few years, or get into that mind set.
(Excuse me, I'm at home today with the kid and he just peed…
edyong | April 15, 2009Autumn is a time of incredible beauty, when the world becomes painted in the red, orange and yelllow palette of falling leaves. But there may be a deeper purpose to these colours, and the red ones in particular. In the eyes of some scientists, they aren't just decay made pretty - they are a tree's way of communicating with aphids and other insects that would make a meal of it. The message is simple: "I am strong. Don't try it."
During winter, trees withdraw the green chlorophyll from their leaves, and textbooks typically say that autumn colours are produced by the pigments that are left…
sciencewoman | April 10, 2009ScienceWoman notes: Last week I gave away a couple of books to readers who enthusiastically promised to review the books. The books were mailed on Friday and I've already gotten the first review back. Talk about enthusiasm! Here's a review from Courtney of Courtney's Blog.
What Are You Optimistic About is one of Edge.org's "celebration of the ideas of the third culture" (for further information, read C.P. Snow's classic, The Two Cultures). There is an introduction by the famed scientist/philosopher Dennett, who says, "It can't all be true, but we need to test them."
Fig. 1. Courtney's…