Social Sciences
terrasig | January 20, 2009
It'll be a few days before I can get together posts on this past weekend's ScienceOnline'09 conference in frigid North Carolina. The Friday Fermentable Live! was a terrific success and it already looks like there are seven posts out there (for example, Eva Amsen on her Nature Networks blog, Expression Patterns, put up an account with vasectomy-like precision).
I had the honor of participating in two sessions: one on gender and allies in STEM, online and off, with the youthful Alice Pawley and Zuska and another on pseudonymity/anonymity and building online reputation with PalMD. Speaking…
tetrapodzoology | January 19, 2009
Over the weekend I and a bunch of others from the Southampton Natural History Society visited the collections at the County Museum, Winchester (Hampshire, UK). This is a research collection and local repository, and is not open to the public. We saw tons of stuff and had a great time. I took Will (my 7-year-old) along, and he loved it, spending literally hours looking through drawers of pinned insects and at stuffed things in cases. I see every indication that kids are naturally fascinated by animals and other living things: it's just that this interest is often not switched on at the right…
mikethemadbiologist | January 19, 2009From the archives:
One of the things that is often neglected on Martin Luther King day is his dedication to economic justice. What is forgotten--often willfully--is that he was an advocate for racial and economic justice. From a speech he gave to striking sanitation workers in Memphis on March 18, 1968 (italics mine):
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…
pharyngula | January 18, 2009It's a good day to take a moment to read Martin Luther King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail. It tells of an oppression I can't even begin to imagine, and of frustration with complacency and a dream that was always being deferred.
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every…
sa smith | January 18, 2009Gene Robinsons opening prayer at the inauguration festivities (go to Abels place to hear about the drama):
O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will...
Bless us with tears - for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.
Bless us with anger - at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.
Bless us with discomfort…
oracknows | January 16, 2009I hate to finish up the week on a bit of a downer, but unfortunately this week I really wasn't in the mood to do justice to Your Friday Dose of Woo, even though I have at least a couple of potential targets--I mean subjects--to cover for my (hopefully) fun little Friday exercise. I was gearing up to try anyway, when I saw something in my e-mail that saddened me greatly. (More on that in a moment.) I even thought of trying to pull off a post on a peer-reviewed article, even though it was pretty late when I got home. However, due to the careful reading and examination of data required, those…
clock | January 15, 2009True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region of perception.
- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy
razib | January 14, 2009About 3 years ago a paper was published on pigmentation which heralded the breaking of the dam when it comes to skin color genetics, SLC24A5, a Putative Cation Exchanger, Affects Pigmentation in Zebrafish and Humans. The zebrafish, a model organism familiar to evo-devoists the world over, played an important role in the paper. The new issue of Zebrafish is totally devoted to pigmentation. The press release was kind of weird, Zebrafish Journal Publishes Skin Pigmentation Studies That Shed Light on the Evolution of Race:
"With the election of the first African-American president of the United…
razib | January 14, 2009Ross Douthat (also, James Poulos) makes an intelligent, well-informed defense of the term using the general framework that I began with (as opposed to some people who simply insist on digressing immediately to forward their own position). There are also intelligent comments below. Instead of responding in a point-by-point fashion to Ross's rejoinder in this post, I'll just elaborate in the comments here and below. Rather, I want to tack to a different issue. My main concern as an atheist who lives in a progressively more religiously pluralist society characterized by liberal democratic…
razib | January 14, 2009Arnold Kling put up a chart which shows how the Masters of the Universe were empty suits. He says:
The pattern is big egos, big money, and big power offering big promises, getting big media play, and making big mistakes (Spitzer's mistakes were relatively small, to be honest). To me, the fiscal stimulus represents yet another redistribution of power away from ordinary people and toward the elite, when already the imbalance is too high. I am more worried about rot at the top of society than at the bottom.
Kling notes that there is also rot at the bottom; the speculative credit binge mentality…
clock | January 14, 2009Voracious Sponges In Underwater Caves Save Reefs:
Tropical oceans are known as the deserts of the sea. And yet this unlikely environment is the very place where the rich and fertile coral reef grows. Dutch researcher Jasper de Goeij investigated how caves in the coral reef ensure the reef's continued existence. Although sponges in these coral caves take up a lot of dissolved organic material, they scarcely grow. However, they do discard a lot of cells that in turn provide food for the organisms on the reef.
Tiny Insect Develops Long-term Memory:
If a specific butterfly anti-sex scent is…
clock | January 13, 2009Computer Game 'Tetris' May Help Reduce Flashbacks To Traumatic Events:
Playing 'Tetris' after traumatic events could reduce the flashbacks experienced in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), preliminary research by Oxford University psychologists suggests.
New Computer Program Enables Powerful Data Analysis On Small Computers:
A powerful yet compact algorithm has been developed that can be used on laptop computers to extract features and patterns from huge and complex data sets.
Digital Communication Technology Helps Clear Path To Personalized Therapies:
Researchers at the Burnham Institute…
cortex | January 12, 2009In yesterday's Washington Post, I reviewed The Art Instinct, a new book by Denis Dutton that uses evolutionary psychology to explain the odd human obsession with making art:
The list of cultural universals -- those features that recur in every human society, from remote rainforest tribes to modern America -- is surprisingly short. There's language, religion and a bunch of traits involving social structures, such as the reliance on leaders.
Denis Dutton, a New Zealand philosopher, would like to add one more item to this list: art. As he observes in his provocative new book, The Art Instinct,…
gregladen | January 9, 2009I think of her now as the Tea Lady, because she was drinking tea when I met her and had an English accent to go along with her English colonial outfit. She was one of the first native white South Africans I had met on my very first trip to that country. And now the Tea Lady, who was in fact a volunteer for the local historical society of a small town a couple hours drive north of Pretoria, was chugging her way up this steep, gravelly mountain path with the rest of us trailing behind gasping for breath.
This is the view looking up the Mwaridzi Valley from the eastern
entrance of Historic…
sa smith | January 8, 2009We know what the US would look like if radical theists like Warren, Robertson, Dobson, James Kennedy, or any doughy sweat-stained evangelical were in a position of real authority.
We know.
Because other countries, even 'secular' ones, dont have the same luxury of the separation of church and state as we do. People in other countries are forced to live their lives under the greasy shadow of beautiful, hope inspiring religion.
Senegal: Court Sentences Nine Men to Heavy Jail Sentences for Sodomy
On January 8, 2008, the nine men appeared in court to respond to charges of criminal conspiracy and…
sporte | January 8, 2009My husband brought this fantastic book home from the ASHG* that I think many of you will find interesting.
The book is: Making the Right Moves A Practical Guide to Scientific Management for Postdocs and New Faculty, published in 2006 by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
You can download the book for free at the HHMI site and there's even a video of Tom Cech.
In fact, this book has such great information, that if it weren't for the interesting discussions in the comment section, I truly think this book would put Drug Monkey Comrade PhysioProf, and Isis…
drorzel | January 6, 2009
Discovering Biology in a Digital World : Another reason why science education sucks
"According to the article almost 40% of the 59 science education specialists, surveyed in the California University system, were "seriously considering leaving" their current jobs and some (20%) were considering leaving the field entirely."
(tags: science education stupid academia)
Squeezing and over-squeezing of triphotons : Abstract : Nature
The paper mentioned in the press release below.
(tags: science physics articles quantum optics experiment)
U of T physicists squeeze light to quantum limit
An…
tetrapodzoology | January 4, 2009Extant sulids - the gannets and boobies - are admittedly pretty uniform (greater diversity existed among fossil forms, as we'll see at some stage), but they still differ in many subtle ways. In the previous sulid post we looked at the gannets: we now turn to the boobies [composite image shown here features Blue-footed booby at top left, Brown booby at bottom left, and Nazca booby at right. All pics from wikipedia].
If you're here because you hadn't realised that 'boobies' was being used in the ornithological sense, sorry. On that subject - everyone knows why the birds are called 'boobies'.…
tfk | December 30, 2008Several of the blogs have pointed to the Disco. Inst.'s shameful abuse of the suicide of Jesse Kilgore in an end-of-year fundraising pitch. Kilgore, a college student who had recently returned from military service in Iraq, had been challenging aspects of his upbringing, and his father (a fundamentalist pastor) concluded that reading Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion inspired Jesse to kill himself. The Disco. Inst. decided that the best thing to do was to glom onto that father's grief in order to drum up end-of-year donation.
Given that the suicide rate for Iraq veterans keeps rising, I'd…
drorzel | December 29, 2008
The Quantum Pontiff : A Curmudgeon's and Improv's Guide to Outliers: Introduction
"Gladwell's books are fun, but I find myself often disagreeing with his analysis, so I thought it would be entertaining to take my time reading his latest and jot down my thoughts as I progress. "
(tags: science social-science society culture medicine books)
Throwing a football with air resistance - angle for maximum range | Dot Physics
"When throwing a football, there is some air resistance this means that 45 degree is not necessarily the angle for the greatest range. Well, can't I just do the same thing as…