Social Sciences
tlambert | November 10, 2008It's only been six months since his previous wrong-headed column claiming that global warming has ended, but Michael Duffy has decided to write another one:
Last month I witnessed something shocking. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was giving a talk at the University of NSW. The talk was accompanied by a slide presentation, and the most important graph showed average global temperatures. For the past decade it represented temperatures climbing sharply.
As this was shown on the screen, Pachauri told his large audience: "We're at a stage where…
grrlscientist | November 10, 2008tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
This Eurasian Blue Tit, Cyanistes caeruleus,
is from the photographer's ancestral village of Rintoul,
near Kinross, which is north of the Firth of Forth,
about 20 miles from Edinburgh, Scotland.
Image: Dave Rintoul, August 2008.
Birds in Science
At 14 years old, Spencer Hardy has solved an avian mystery and discovered significant evidence for the only bird other than a penguin to incubate its eggs on glacial ice. Hardy's geoscientist father, Douglas, was stationed in southeastern Peru at the Quelccaya Ice Cap in the…
tfk | November 9, 2008I confess that I still don't know how I feel about the events of last Tuesday. There's an overwhelming elation, but also the knowledge that the next 4-8 years will be tough. Republicans will be sniping at the Obama administration, and the Democratic circular firing squad is already assembling. On some issues, it'll be necessary to reassemble the movement that elected Obama so that we can force him to do the right thing, and other times we'll have to get the band back together in order to make sure other people do what he wants them to.
But above all that political meditation, I don't know…
drorzel | November 7, 2008
Study finds many motorists don't see need to heed speed limits
A result that will surprise approximately nobody with a driver's license.
(tags: social-science news law silly)
Better Late Than Never?: Titanic | The A.V. Club
"If only every woman in the world was periodically forced to choose between two fantastically beautiful men--one rich and civilized yet stuffy, and one poor but free and capable. Then we wouldn't have to keep seeing that plotline over and over again, because everyone would be so bored from dealing with it in real life that it wouldn't be the stuff of clichéd dreams…
laelaps | November 7, 2008With the election of Barack Obama as the next president of the United States, many science-savvy folks have breathed a (tentative) sigh of relief. Perhaps we can finally put all this creationism in the classroom nonsense to rest now that a progressive Democrat is next up for the presidency. I'm not so sure, and there was a time when the loudest defense of Creation came from progressive Democrats.
The brand of young-earth creationism we are familiar with today is not so much rooted in Victorian responses to Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, but the fundamentalist fervor prevalent in…
pharyngula | November 6, 2008Imagine yourself in this situation. A young girl is accused of a heinous crime — use your imagination here, too, and think of the most horrible thing a person can do — and she is trapped in front of you, helpless. You have a rock in your hands. People around you are urging you to kill her; they say that you are justified in taking her life. What would you do?
Let's say you don't have a rock, but are just part of the large crowd of spectators, witnessing a small group of men killing this girl. What would you do then?
Be honest now.
I wouldn't be able to do kill anyone, and I would try to stop…
sa smith | November 5, 2008I survived yesterday :) Back to normal science programming soon.
But for all of you working to ween yourself off of politics news, Ive got a nicotine patch for ya: Freepers and RR.
Bask in the schadenfreude. Come down off the laughing gas. Get back to work :P
OH! And Im sure you all know what my recommendation is for Malia and Sashas new puppy!! Im SO glad NYT chose to quote the Human Society of the United States, Animal Liberation Front pieces of shit in their coverage of this fun event. *rolleyes*
tlambert | November 5, 2008On July 16, Andrew Bolt gave us this:
What consensus? The American Physical Society reports:
There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution.
However, this wasn't the opion of the American Physical Society, but rather that of Jeffrey Marque, one editor of an APS newsletter. In the next issue Marque retracted:
Our editorial comments in the July 2008 issue include the…
mikethemadbiologist | November 5, 2008
Tonight is a triumph for the Coalition of the Sane.
While legitimized insanity has been happening since the Reagan era (Got James Watt?), the last eight years have been dreadful for those not suffering from massive psychological delusions. Our political discourse (such as it is) has moved well beyond arguing over marginal income tax rates. We are, instead, arguing about basic physical, material phenomena: is global warming real; did evolution actually happen; how does human reproduction work?
This is insane. No biologist or climatologist should ever have to waster her time arguing with…
pharyngula | November 3, 2008Poor little Ken Ham gets no respect. He sets up this fancy museum, he keeps pushing his silly ideas, and what happens? Smart people like Daniel Phelps, president of the Kentucky Paleontological Society, calls him a moron. Deservedly.
I don't need to say much, though. The scathing excoriation of Ham has already been done:
You said that unicorns are real. You claim that the Beowulf story is evidence of human cohabitation with dinosaurs. You say that sometimes religious genocide is OK. You think that the government is training people to talk to aliens. You believe that evolution is a random…
drorzel | November 3, 2008
Fafblog! the whole world's only source for Fafblog.
""All we really need is some kind of simple technological solution," says Giblets, "like a garbage-powered weather machine or a synthetic source of God.""
(tags: fafblog science environment silly blogs)
McCain Refusing To Tell Voters What's In Box Unless Elected | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
Don't fall for it-- it's just Joe the Plumber
(tags: politics us silly onion)
slacktivist: Shine a light
"If we were to draw this relationship as a Venn diagram, bigotry would be a smaller circle entirely inside the larger circle of…
amillikan | November 3, 2008Greetings ScienceBlogs readers. In this post: The large versions of the photos on the Education & Careers and Politics channels, and a recap of the channel quotes.
Education & Careers
Education & Careers channel photo. An enthusiastic submarine driver pops his head out of the hatch to smile for the camera. From Flickr, by jurvetson
Often in the scientific world, work and play intermingle. In this case, it appears to be especially so. Putting in the time to learn a specialty science can be incredibly rewarding.
This week's reader reaction quote on the Education & Careers…
pharyngula | November 3, 2008William Ayers was a young radical in the 1960s — this is admitted, accepted, and not in question at all. Now William Ayers is a respected academic, somebody who is no longer advocating violence, who is a crusader for social justice and urban educational reform within the system, and that sounds like it ought to be an interesting and worthy story. So why is the Republican party trying to brand him as a terrorist? He's a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago!
The latest sad twist is that he was invited to speak at a student research conference, and the craven University of Nebraska…
clock | November 2, 2008If you live in (most places in) the United States as well as many other countries, you have reset your clocks back by one hour last night (or last week). How will that affect you and other people?
One possibility is that you are less likely to suffer a heart attack tomorrow morning than on any other Monday of the year. Why? Let me try to explain in as simple way as possible (hoping that oversimplification will not lead to intolerable degrees of inaccuracy).
Almost all biochemical, physiological and behavioral parameters in almost all (at least multicellular) organisms display diurnal (daily…
jlynch | November 1, 2008ASU has a number of exciting graduate programs in history, philosophy and social studies of science (with particular emphasis on the biological sciences). I am a faculty member for three of these programs (Biology & Society, Philosophy & Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology) and have worked with PhD and MA/MS students. If you are an undergraduate or graduate student who wants to study in these fields, please do not hesitate to use the contact information below or contact me with any questions you may have.
We announce new graduate programs to study science and society…
edyong | November 1, 2008
In the heart of Bolivia, an Amazonian society is losing its traditional knowledge of the medicinal value of local plants, to the detriment of its children's health. The Tsimane' are a small seven thousand-strong population living in a lowland region of Bolivia, who possess tremendous knowledge about the plants they share their forest with.
Their botanical know-how trickles down through the generations and allows them to use the local plant-life for construction, tool-making, medicine and food. These plants account for over half of their household consumption of goods, while those…
revere | November 1, 2008No one who knows me would ever consider me a domestic terrorist. I am, in fact, a pacifist. You may think that's naive, but it would be a real stretch to consider my pacifism to be the same as terrorism, even if you think it helps terrorism (in which case I strenuously disagree). I'm a doctor and take the responsibility to heal pretty seriously. Barack Obama is being accused of "palling around with terrorists" because he has had an association with people the McCain campaign decided they want to call domestic terrorists purely for the purpose of inferring guilt -- guilt, literally, by…
razib | October 30, 2008Evolution of trust and trustworthiness: social awareness favours personality differences (Open Access):
Interest in the evolution and maintenance of personality is burgeoning. Individuals of diverse animal species differ in their aggressiveness, fearfulness, sociability and activity. Strong trade-offs, mutation-selection balance, spatio-temporal fluctuations in selection, frequency dependence and good-genes mate choice are invoked to explain heritable personality variation, yet for continuous behavioural traits, it remains unclear which selective force is likely to maintain distinct…
tetrapodzoology | October 30, 2008
Do you remember the photo - provided courtesy of Colin McHenry - showing a variety of crocodilian skulls? I published it in an article on the CEE Functional Anatomy meeting, and here it is again. The challenge was to try and identify the largest skull. Suggestions included Saltwater croc Crocodylus porosus, outsized American croc C. acutus or Slender-snouted croc Mecistops cataphractus, but it's none of those (for the resurrection of the genus Mecistops Gray, 1844 for cataphractus see McAiley et al. 2006). The monster skull is in fact that of a False gharial Tomistoma schlegelii. Yes, a…
dgmacarthur | October 30, 2008One of the ethical quandaries raised by direct-to-consumer genetic testing is the possibility that customers may send in DNA samples for analysis from other people who haven't provided informed consent - prospective spouses, for instance, a la Gattaca - and then use that genetic information for nefarious purposes. In the past, personal genomics company 23andMe has responded to this possibility by arguing that it's not really the company's responsibility to prevent its customers from performing illegal acts; they have also (quite convincingly) pointed out the difficulties of extracting 2 mL of…