Social Sciences
ddobbs | March 18, 2009It didn't take long for my Scientific American story on PTSD to draw the sort of fire I expected. A doctor blogging as "egalwan" at Follow Me Here writes
[Dobbs] is critical of a culture which "seemed reflexively to view bad memories, nightmares and any other sign of distress as an indicator of PTSD." To critics like this, the overwhelming incidence of PTSD diagnoses in returning Iraqi veterans is not a reflection of the brutal meaningless horror to which many of the combatants were exposed but of a sissy culture that can no longer suck it up.
Doctor or not, he's seeing politics where my…
drorzel | March 18, 2009
bs / 17 / 03 / 2009 / News / Home - Inside Higher Ed
"[A] panel at the annual meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication considered the question of âEmpty Rhetoric and Academic Bullshit: Strategies for Compositionâs Self-Representation in National Arenas.â In the discussion, participants differed on how much of a problem their language is â and because this is a meeting of language and rhetoric experts, the discussion referenced issues that were personal to scholarsâ work and values."
(tags: education academia writing humanities inside-higher-ed)
Two Cents on AIG Â…
palmd | March 16, 2009Thankfully, I don't receive all that much blog-related mail. But this weekend I received several communications about a piece in popular liberal blog. The piece is (ostensibly) about Lyme disease, which coincidentally happens to be one of the topics of my first post here at SBM. In fact, I've written about Lyme disease a number of times, and Dr. Novella has a very good summary of the controversy at one of his other blogs. Since we've discussed this so many times, I won't be reviewing the entire controversy, but looking at this particular blog post to examine how our personal experiences…
drorzel | March 15, 2009
Cocktail Party Physics: measles, mumps, rubellaor autism
"Let me throw just a few statistics at you, just to illustrate how important vaccines have been in the increasing quality of public health in the US alone.
* The incidence of polio dropped to nearly zero by 1960 (polio vaccine introduced in 1955)
* Measles cases dropped sharply between 1955 and 1970 (measles vaccine introduced in 1963)
* The incidence of congenital rubella syndrome dropped from an estimated 20,000 in 1964 to 7 in 1983 (the rubella vaccine was introduced in 1967)"
(tags: science society medicine history…
grrlscientist | March 14, 2009tags: books, memoir, godlessness, losing faith, William Lobdell
I am most pleased to tell you that William Lobdell, an award-winning journalist from the LATimes, who is also a new book author, as well as a blog writer, college lecturer and public speaker and media consultant, will be in NYC this coming Saturday to talk about and read from his hot-off-the-presses book, Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America -- and Found Unexpected Peace.
When: Saturday, March 14, 300pm - 430pm
Where: The third floor of the Muhlenberg Branch of the Public Library, 209 W.…
clock | March 14, 2009Fridges And Washing Machines Liberated Women, Study Suggests:
The advent of modern appliances such as washing machines and refrigerators had a profound impact on 20th Century society, according to a new Université de Montréal study. Plug-in conveniences transformed women's lives and enabled them to enter the workforce, says Professor Emanuela Cardia, from the Department of Economics.
Human-generated Sounds May Be Killing Fish:
Anthropogenic, or human generated, sounds have the potential to significantly affect the lives of aquatic animals - from the individual animal's well-being, right…
clock | March 12, 2009The Two Cultures in the 21st Century:
A full-day symposium sponsored by: Science & the City, ScienceDebate2008, Science Communication Consortium
At the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow's famous Rede Lecture on the importance to society of building a bridge between the sciences and humanities, this day-long symposium brings together leading scholars, scientists, politicians, authors, and representatives of the media to explore the persistence of the Two Cultures gap and how it can be overcome. More than 20 speakers will cover topics including science in politics, education, film and media,…
sa smith | March 12, 2009Please watch this clip, and count the number of times the word 'pitbull' is used:
Embedded video from CNN Video
Im sure you will be shocked to hear this, but the anti-science OK legislator Paul Wesselhoft is also violently against these family pets. I guess the ability to interpret scientific data is not his particular strong suit.
H/T lowcountry dog blog
laelaps | March 12, 2009I cannot write a full review of it yet as I am only about 70 pages in, but so far I am very impressed by Sigrid Schmalzer's new book The People's Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in 20th Century Science. Most of what I have previously learned about "Peking Man" (Homo erectus specimens from Dragon Bone Hill) had to do with its identification of it as an early human that, at the time, confirmed that Asia was the birthplace of humans. Unfortunately the fossils were lost when scientists tried to ship them out of the country for safekeeping at the onset of WWII, but surprisingly the…
scientificactivist | March 11, 2009On Saturday, animal rights extremists torched the car of a scientist at UCLA--just one more incident in a long streak of violent threats and wanton destruction of property. LA Times columnist Tim Rutten gets it right when he states:
No sensible person dismisses the humane treatment of animals as inconsequential, but what the fanatics propose is not an advance in social ethics. To the contrary, it is an irrational intrusion into civil society, a tantrum masquerading as a movement. It is a kind of ethical pornography in which assertion stands in for ideas, and willfulness for argument, all for…
jstemwedel | March 11, 2009In an op-ed by Tim Rutten in today's Los Angeles Times:
No sensible person dismisses the humane treatment of animals as inconsequential, but what the fanatics propose is not an advance in social ethics. To the contrary, it is an irrational intrusion into civil society, a tantrum masquerading as a movement. It is a kind of ethical pornography in which assertion stands in for ideas, and willfulness for argument, all for the sake of self-gratification. At the end of the day, there is no moral equivalence between the lives of humans and those of animals.
I think this is essentially the point…
clock | March 10, 2009This month's Science Cafe (description below) will be held on March 24th at Tir Na Nog. Our speaker is Dr. David Reif from the US Environmental Protection Agency. That evening we will be talking about the interplay between our genetic makeup and our environment & lifestyles. We will also discuss human genetics with a focus on evolutionary theory. Here is a link (http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1879213,00.html#) to an interesting article by a popular author, Carl Zimmer that you might find fun to read. The article gives some background on Darwin and the ideas behind his…
grrlscientist | March 9, 2009tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
Chatham Island (Mollymawk) Albatross, Thalassarche cauta eremita.
With 18 out of 22 albatross species threatened with extinction,
the FAO should be congratulated on establishing a gold standard
for reducing seabird bycatch -- a major conservation step forward.
Image: Alan Tate [larger view].
Birds in Science
Some of the world's leading paleontologists are attempting to recreate a dinosaur -- or something a lot like a dinosaur -- by starting with a chicken embryo and working backward to engineer a "chickenosaurus" or…
oracknows | March 9, 2009
PZ's muscling in on my territory. Apparently, ruling the Darwinian, creationist-destroying atheist cephalopod blogging world isn't enough, and he has to start moving in on medicine. No problem, given that this time around he brought some rather interesting woo to my attention, suggesting it as perhaps a suitable topic for Your Friday Dose of Woo called God's Answer to Cancer. Besides, it's PZ's birthday; so as a birthday present, instead of reposting the same silly picture that I have for the last two years, I'll simply link to him now and add, oh, perhaps 1% to his traffic total for today…
grrlscientist | March 8, 2009tags: books, memoir, godlessness, losing faith, William Lobdell
I am most pleased to tell you that William Lobdell, an award-winning journalist from the LATimes, who is also a new book author, as well as a blog writer, college lecturer and public speaker and media consultant, will be in NYC this coming Saturday to talk about and read from his hot-off-the-presses book, Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America -- and Found Unexpected Peace.
When: Saturday, March 14, 300pm - 430pm
Where: The third floor of the Muhlenberg Branch of the Public Library, 209 W.…
gregladen | March 7, 2009 The Humanism of the Star Trek Universe. Scott Lohman and Robert Price on Atheists Talk #0060, Sunday March 8, 2009
Gene Roddenberry convinced the executives at Paramount that a show about exploring space would appeal to a mass audience. They funded a weekly series for three beautiful years, and it turns out he was partially right. The show was not a ratings giant until it went into syndication and cartoons some five years after it had been canceled. From there it fostered a "Big Bang" of cultural infusion. Movies, fan fiction, spinoff series and "cons" exploded the concepts of Star Trek…
palmd | March 6, 2009If someone were to write a biography of the Creationist neurosurgeon, "Unhinged" would be an apt title. He used to content himself with rants against philosophical materialism, and evangelize for dualism with a zealous religiosity. But that wasn't enough. The "forces of secularism" seemed to keep growing, despite his desire to see some heavenly smiting. In his latest rants, the gloves are off---it's scalpels at twenty paces.
Let's see what's got Egnor so exercised.
First came the announcement by Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) that they would boycott Louisiana…
drorzel | March 4, 2009
The Verne Gun â KarlSchroeder.com
"I call it the Verne gun because frankly, a name like THE ATOMIC CANNON would just not go over well in certain circles. In any case, the principle is the same as Verne's original idea, but using modern technology: you set off a nuclear charge underground where the blast, heat, radiation and fallout can all be contained, and use Orion-type technology to direct its energy into orbiting a very big, very heavy spacecraft. This vessel would experience hundreds to thousands of g's of acceleration--you couldn't put humans in it. But Wang calculates that a 10…
gregladen | March 4, 2009Richard Dawkins came to Minneapolis and gave a talk, sponsored by CASH, the primary atheist/humanist group on the UMN campus, on "The Purpose of Purpose."
Before the talk, several of us got together at Annie's Parlour. It was harmonic convergence, in a sense, of numerous independent groups all planning to go to Annie's and ending up at the same table, including but not limited to Amanda and myself, PZ and his wife and daughter, Stephanie, Mike, Mr. and Mrs. Linux in Exile, Lynn, and a few others who don't have links. After the talk, we spent close to an hour hanging around with Amanda and…
pharyngula | March 4, 2009"WE WILL BURY YOU!" seems to be his message in his latest complaint. He is very upset that The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology is boycotting Louisiana, and he informs us all in a long argumentum ad populum that the ignorant outnumber us, addressed to the president and members of SICB.
Most Americans are creationists, in the sense that they believe that God played an important role in creating human beings and they don't accept a strictly Darwinian explanation for life. And they think that they ought to be able to ask questions about evolution in their own public schools. They…