Social Sciences
pontiff | December 29, 2008So I picked up Malcolm Gladwell's newest book Outliers: The Story of Success the other day, as I'm sure many of you will be doing on your next trip to the airport (where stands of Gladwell's hardcover book, marked down thirty percent, block your every exit through the already cramped airport bookstores.) 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. Well "entertaining" in that "holy shit dude you are pedantic" sort of way. Note that I really do…
sa smith | December 29, 2008Jim Gorant, thank you.
The dog approaches the outstretched hand. Her name is Sweet Jasmine, and she is 35 pounds of twitchy curiosity with a coat the color of fried chicken, a pink nose and brown eyes. She had spent a full 20 seconds studying this five-fingered offering before advancing. Now, as she moves forward, her tail points straight down, her butt is hunched toward the ground, her head is bowed, her ears pinned back. She stands at maybe three quarters of her height.
She gets within a foot of the hand and stops. She licks her snout, a sign of nervousness, and looks up at the stranger,…
awild | December 29, 2008
Another year passes. The economy is in the toilet. Violence spreads in the middle east. In these trying times, one question must weigh on the minds of concerned citizens: "What's happening in world of ant science?"
Of course. Here are the myrmecological highlights of 2008:
The Demise of the Standard Ant. That is the title of a review by Juergen Heinze, but the idea that our basic conception of how ant colonies work is overly simplistic receives plenty of additional support from the research community.  For instance, Smith et al document the complexity of caste determination in…
oracknows | December 29, 2008I've been meaning to write about this topic for quite a while but never really found a reason to. Indeed, this one's been floating around in the back of my mind for a long time. Perhaps one reason is that it's hard for a surgeon to write about this topic without coming off sounding like an old fart, a curmudgeon, unhappy about change and thinking that a system that was good enough for me must sure as hell be good enough for the current generation of residents. In fact, even after seeing an article that normally would have spurred me to write about this topic more than two weeks ago, I stored…
jstemwedel | December 27, 2008Dr. Isis expresses reservations about signing on for Twisty Faster's revolution.
ScienceWoman offers a sketch of what her revolution might look like.
Me? I'm pretty exhausted from today's outing with my offspring, what with it being Winter Break, otherwise known as 24/7 parenting. But I have a few brief ideas of what I'd like to see on the post-revolutionary landscape.
It would be a joyous thing for us to create a world -- professional, civic, social, familial -- where each individual human being is regarded as fully human, rather than as part of some special category not deserving of our…
revere | December 26, 2008It's the end of a year that saw historic election in the United States. An African American was elected President. To many of us felt like a turning point. We'll have to see. But if it is, it is due to many people, some of whom we know, most of whom we will never know. Black people fought hard and long and suffered greatly. They had allies in the white community, including many academics. I thought of all this recently when reading the Preface of a book on the nineteenth century philosopher Gottlob Frege. If you aren't a philosopher or philosophy student (or possibly a logician) you may not…
cwilcox | December 23, 2008Even in Orangutans, apparently.
Now, when I read the headline "Orangutans trade favors," I thought the article was very different... Oh well.
Regardless, what the study found was that orangutans learned the fairness of trade and how to get the most of a situation. Researchers gave two orangutans a set of tokens. One token, the primates learned, gave themselves a banana. Another gave the other orangutan a banana. At first, one orangutan, was very generous to her partner, and willingly traded in tokens to give him treats. When she realized, however, he was less giving, she stopped. He, in turn…
oracknows | December 23, 2008Of all the forms of quackery out there, the "energy healing" methods and "faith healing" methods have to be the most ridiculous. After all, the claims of "healers" using such modalities, when boiled down to their very essence, are nothing less (and nothing more) than claiming the ability to do magic. Indeed, "energy healing" involves the claim of being able to manipulate "life energies" undetectable by science for therapeutic intent using either ritualistic hand motions or the inscribing of symbols in the air (reiki), concentration and the laying on of hands (therapeutic touch, reiki, and…
drorzel | December 22, 2008
The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media » Far from the Peer-Reviewed Journal,Scientists Confront How-Tos of Op-Eds
"So how can scientists strategically convey their messages to a broad audience without losing the nuances of their field? "
(tags: science politics writing journalism)
Christmas, please, but hold the treacle: 42 holiday entertainments that don't make us want to claw our eyes out with rage | The A.V. Club
Does not include Pratchett's Hogfather, probably because it's too British, but it's better than almost anything that did make the list.
(tags: culture television…
dgmacarthur | December 22, 2008Emily Singer has a fantastic article in MIT's Technology Review reviewing the current state of play in human genomics. A curious highlight for me was this panel of mug-shots from the PGP-10, the 10 high-profile volunteers currently having their genomes sequenced as part of the Personal Genome Project:
Top row from left: Misha Angrist, Keith Batchelder, George Church, Esther Dyson, Rosalynn Gill.
Bottom row from left: John Halamka, Stanley Lapidus, Kirk Maxey, Steven Pinker, James Sherley.
Links for each participant are to their profile on the PGP website, which includes information on…
sb admin | December 18, 2008I received an email today from Leo Gerard, the Int'l President of the United Steelworkers, the 850,000 person-strong union of men and women employed in Canada and the U.S. who work in the metals, rubber, chemicals, paper, oil refining and the service industries. His email simply read:
Excellent video celebrating 60th anniversary of UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Please watch and remember how powerful it is to treat every human being and our planet with dignity. Regards, leo.
Dear President Gerard. Thanks.
Watch it (00:04:31)
Here are the "lyrics."
Every man, woman…
greengabbro | December 15, 2008Hey, geobloggers: If you're going to AGU, will you tell us what you hear that is new and different? PLEEZ?
Emily Lackdawilla at the Planetary Society Blog can't make it to all the sessions she wants to see and is hoping to swap notes about Enceladus:
I desperately need help from someone who will be at the Enceladus sessions to jot down a few notes for me on anything that is new or changed from previous thoughts on the nature of that moon.
I just want to know what you think is interesting, exciting, or trendy this year, and why. Subjective "buzz" and plain ol' irresponsible speculation are…
clock | December 14, 2008This EurekAlert title got my attention this morning: Immunity stronger at night than during day:
The immune system's battle against invading bacteria reaches its peak activity at night and is lowest during the day.
Experiments with the laboratory model organism, Drosophila melanogaster, reveal that the specific immune response known as phagocytosis oscillates with the body's circadian rhythm, according to Stanford researchers who presented their findings at the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) 48th Annual Meeting, Dec. 13-17, 2008 in San Francisco.
"These results suggest that immunity…
pharyngula | December 13, 2008Australia has taken an interesting step forward: they're going to allow instruction in humanism in their schools, apparently in place of traditional religion classes.
Victorian state primary school students will soon have an alternative -- religious education lessons taught by people who do not believe in God and say there is "no evidence of any supernatural power".
The Humanist Society of Victoria has developed a curriculum, which the State Government accreditation body says it intends to approve, to deliver 30-minute lessons each week of "humanist applied ethics" to primary pupils.…
edyong | December 12, 2008Elephants always count as star attractions in any zoo or wildlife park lucky enough to have them. But while many visitors may thrill to see such majestic creatures in the flesh, some scientists have raised concerns about how well animals so sociable and intelligent would fare in even the best of zoo environments.
Now, a new study suggests that some of these concerns might be warranted. Ros Clubb from the RSPCA, together with colleagues from various universities and the Zoological Society of London, studied the health of zoo elephants with a census of mammoth proportions.
Concentrating on…
nisbetmc | December 11, 2008The University of Wisconsin news office has posted a valuable Q&A with my friend and UW professor Dietram Scheufele. The occasion is a new study he has published with colleagues at Nature Nanotechnology, examining the relationship between the social background of audiences and their views on the moral acceptability of nanotechnology, comparing perceptions in the US to Europe.
The interview hits closely on some of the major themes Scheufele and I cover in a manuscript that provides a big picture view on new directions in science communication. Here's a key excerpt from the interview:
WW…
drorzel | December 8, 2008
Hope in a box: The A.V. Club's guide to holiday gifts for the new era of good feelings | The A.V. Club
"Words like "need" or "necessary" lose all meaning around Christmas, even when the economy is collapsing. For example, does anyone actually need a flexible plastic case to prevent their bananas from getting bruised? Of course not. "
(tags: silly onion gadgets)
Fafblog! the whole world's only source for Fafblog.
So I'm headin out to the store to get some popcorn when a snowstorm hits town an freezes me in a block a ice. A coupla thousand years later I get thawed out by some friendly…
denialism | December 8, 2008I was reading two articles on disparate subjects and found them oddly linked in my mind. The first former terrorist Bill Ayers' explanation of why he didn't respond when Obama was smeared by association and the second P. Michael Conn and James V. Parker writing for the WaPo about the escalation in recent years of animal rights terrorism.
What struck me about both these articles is the interesting divide between how terrorists justify their behaviors and diminish their objectives of striking fear into their opponents, and the reality of what the subjects of such acts perceive. Conn and…
clock | December 6, 2008Michelle asks: What Kind of Online Superhero Are You?
The easiest way to think of this is through superheroes, of course. In many comics such as Superman, Spiderman, and Batman, the protagonist has double life. The characters seem to cherish both roles-the closeness of relationships with others in the standard life and the power and responsibility of the superhero life. In other comics such as X Men, the hero and the person are the same. Wolverine, although sometimes escaping into solitude as Logan, is always a Mutant. Jean Grey is always Jean Grey and Storm is always Storm. There is no…
cwilcox | December 5, 2008A twelve year old boarder collie mix survived being frozen to the sidewalk for a whole night in Wisconsin. The overnight temperature dropped into the single digits, yet the elderly animal survived. How?
Jiffy, the unfortunate dog, is morbidly obese. "Being insulated as well as he was with the layers of fat he had probably saved the dog's life," said the Humane Society Shelter Manager, Carey Payne, in a news story
The dog's owner said she couldn't get the dog inside herself, and checked on him every few hours to make sure he was ok. The animal care workers poured warm water over the dog's back…