Social Sciences
jlynch | July 14, 2008
Very sad news for those of us who do physical anthropology. Charles ("Charlie") Lockwood (University College London) was killed today in a motorcycle accident in London. He is survived by his parents and sisters.
Charlie was a talented morphologist both in the sense of being a descriptive anatomist and quantitative biologist. I met him in the late 90's when he came to ASU's Institute of Origins for a post-doc after completing his PhD at the University of Witwatersrand. He, Bill Kimbel and I shared the pain of rejected NSF grant proposals before receiving NSF money to study the use of…
grrlscientist | July 14, 2008tags: poverty level, poverty threshold, federal definition of poverty, Michael Bloomberg, NYC, politics, society
Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity, nothing exceeds the criticisms made of the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.
~ Herman Melville
How do you define poverty? Do you think it is the lack of nutritious food, clean clothing, reasonable housing and adequate health care? Even though your definition of what constitutes poverty probably hasn't changed much during your lifetime, the basic financial resources necessary to keep you from being…
sheril | July 14, 2008I've been offline for months, having tired of the ridiculous ramblings you flightless hominids occupy yourselves with involving God knows what. However, on that topic, the recent outbursts in and out of the blogosphere have me so perplexed, I'm inclined to give everyone involved a good bite on the nose.
From a bird's eye view, I cannot fathom why humans spend so much time arguing over who's got religion right. Honestly, take it from a highly evolved species [ahem, the conure], all of your bemoaning isn't worth peanuts. Believe whatever you'd like, but don't get your feathers ruffled over…
kevin z | July 13, 2008
When global warming raises the sea levels and wipes out most of the large cities of the world. We can rest assured that our floating lilypad cities will protect us and form a utopic society where we will all wear togas and be peaceful prosperous people celebrating scientific achievements. Until the aliens come and destroy us that is.
Check out this concept floating city, from the Daily Mail:
"The 'Lilypad City' would float around the world as an independent and fully self-sustainable home. With a lake at its centre to collect and purify rainwater, it would be accessed by three separate…
sb admin | July 12, 2008I was trying to avoid weighing in on this one, but blogorrhea always wins.
I won't bother rehashing the details of the imbroglio---if you don't know, well, you've been sleeping. Go on...google "pharyngula cracker"...I can wait.
OK, now that you've caught up, here's my two cents.
I'm conflicted about this. It's not usually a good thing to offend people's deeply held beliefs unless those beliefs are deeply offensive. A free society requires a great deal of tolerance. This of course cuts both ways--if Catholics can expect reasonable peace, so can those who criticize their beliefs.
As I…
drorzel | July 9, 2008
In Grad Admissions, Where Is Class? :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs
"A study just published in PS: Political Science and Politics suggests that in graduate departments, class may be nowhere to be found in admissions decisions."
(tags: academia class-war social-science humanities science)
Dennis Overbye -- Talk to the Newsroom -- The New York Times -- Reader Questions and Answers - Question - NYTimes.com
Q&A with one of the best in the business.
(tags: science journalism)
Uncool, man. Just uncool. at Tobias Buckell Online
"I've since learned…
purepedantry | July 9, 2008Kenneth Chang, guest-blogging at TeirneyLab, laments the use of the word "organic" in both the contexts of organic chemistry and as a term for natural foods:
Organic derives from Greek, organikos. The original meaning was, logically, something related to an organ of the body. The meaning later generalized to "characteristic of, pertaining to, or derived from living organisms."
Nowadays, the most prevalent meaning of organic is in the supermarket -- natural, without artificial ingredients, grown without chemical fertilizers -- a fuzzy notion codified by 27,000 or so words of federal…
oracknows | July 9, 2008I've said it before, and I'll say it again. J.B. Handley, that bull-in-a-china-shop general in the mercury militia who detests me intensely, is about as ignorant as they come when it comes to science and clinical trials. Yesterday, he provided yet more evidence of his cluelessness in his latest piece posted to that repository for all things antivaccine, Age of Autism.
Mr. Handley's all in a lather because the Associate Press published a story yesterday about a proposed NIH-sponsored clinical trial of chelation therapy for autism entitled Fringe autism treatment could get federal study.…
clock | July 8, 2008
Rare Microorganism That Produces Hydrogen May Be Key To Tomorrow's Hydrogen Economy:
An ancient organism from the pit of a collapsed volcano may hold the key to tomorrow's hydrogen economy. Scientists from across the world have formed a team to unlock the process refined by a billions-year old archaea. The U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute will expedite the research by sequencing the hydrogen-producing organism for comparative genomics.
Are Hands-free Cellphones Really Safer?:
Since April 1 when Nova Scotia outlawed the use of hand-held cellphones while driving, sales of hands…
scientificactivist | July 8, 2008The Animal Research War
by P. Michael Conn and James V. Parker
Palgrave Macmillan: 2008, 224 pages.
Buy now! (Amazon)
In a dark room, buried in a nondescript building somewhere in London, an orderly array of new trainees sits silently, listening intently as a senior police official delivers a security briefing. Clicking through slide after slide of photos of activists, extremists, and terrorists, the official carefully explains who each person is, what organization(s) he or she is associated with, and what level of threat that person poses. All of this would probably look like business as…
clock | July 7, 2008Oh, how I hate this (mis)use of the term!
Male Biological Clock Also 'Ticking': Fertility Problems Greater For Men Over 35:
Pregnancy rates decrease and miscarriages increase when a father is over 35 years of age, a scientist will tell the 24th annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology on July 7. Dr. Stéphanie Belloc, of the Eylau Centre for Assisted Reproduction, Paris, France, will say that this is the first time that such a strong paternal effect on reproductive outcomes has been shown.
Nature Reserves Attract Humans, But At A Cost To Biodiversity:…
razib | July 7, 2008Most of you who read this weblog know that one of my primary preoccupations is how to invest my marginal time in terms of reading to optimize whatever it is I want to optimize (i.e., to "know stuff"). Life is short. So I recently began reflecting on the choices I make in terms of reading "classics," and how great thinkers of the past are remembered. Euclid's Elements for example is still relevant today. Arguably the most successful textbook in the history of the world its usage is obviated by the integration of many of its insights into mathematics as a whole. I know many people who go…
oracknows | July 7, 2008Given all the heartbreaking stuff that's going on with our dog this week, I'm rather grateful to John Lehrer for pointing me to this uplifting article about the dogs abused by the evil and despicable Michael Vick.
It turns out that that bastard didn't end up leaving all his dogs so vicious that euthanasia is the only option or too vicious to be reclaimed. Through love and hard work, most of the dogs have been saved:
Of the 49 pit bulls animal behavior experts evaluated in the fall, only one was deemed too vicious to warrant saving and was euthanized. (Another was euthanized because it was…
sa smith | July 7, 2008Remember a couple months ago, when I freaked out at The Humane Society for speaking out against city animal shelters going no-kill? But then it turned out The Human Society wasnt really 'The Humane Society'? It was really 'The Humane Society of the United States', an animal liberation group like PETA and ALF, cannibalizing The Humane Societies reputation?
Those goddamned bastards have done it again.
I was reading a lovely article about the rehabilitation of Michael Vicks dogs, and half way through I see this asshole quoted:
John Goodwin, a dogfighting expert with the Humane Society and a…
revere | July 6, 2008It's not bad enough that the professional heart of CDC is heading for the exits as fast as they can get there in response to the high handed, abrasive and incompetent management of its Director, Dr. Julie Gerberding. Not bad enough at all. Dr. Gerberding now is getting rid of good people who haven't voluntarily jumped ship. Celeste Montforton at the public health blog, The Pump Handle, where we sometimes post and which is one of the mainstays of the public health blogosphere, brings us news that Dr. John Howard, Director for the last six years of the National Institute of Occupational Health…
illconsidered | July 5, 2008Below is a listing of all the articles to be found in the "How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic" guide, presented as a handy one-stop shop for all the material you should need to rebut the more common anti-global warming science arguments constantly echoed across the internet.
In what I hope is an improvement on the original categorization, they have been divided and subdivided along 4 separate lines: Stages of Denial, Scientific Topics, Types of Argument, Levels of Sophistication. This should facilitate quick retrieval of specific entries. Individual articles will appear under multiple headings…
cortex | July 4, 2008You know what makes me proud to be an American? The fact that the black presidential candidate with the funny African-Muslim name is leading in the polls against the white aviator war hero married to a beer heiress. And I'm not just saying that because I want universal health care and a progressive tax policy (although I do). I think what it really illustrates is just how far this country has come within Barack Obama's lifetime.
Now, I'm not sure I agree with that recent Shelby Steele quote about how "white Americans have made more moral progress in the last forty years than any people in…
razib | July 3, 2008They say that to understand the present you need to understand the past. This seems likely to be true, but when it comes to understanding human affairs in their historical and sociological detail I have to admit that I'm skeptical of much genuine positive insight. That being said, I do believe that one can constrain the blind choices and flights of intuition one has through an exploration of the sample space of data which might allow for falsification of a subset of the myriad models. In short, to call bullshit you have to know shit.
A concrete example of this are the events leading up to…
gregladen | June 27, 2008
Perhaps judging a man by his cologne isn't as superficial as it seems.
Duke University researchers, using sophisticated machinery to analyze hundreds of chemical components in a ringtailed lemur's distinctive scent, have found that individual males are not only advertising their fitness for fatherhood, but also a bit about their family tree as well.
"We now know that there's information about genetic quality and relatedness in scent," said Christine Drea, a Duke associate professor of biological anthropology and biology. The male's scent can reflect his mixture of genes, and to which…
loom | June 27, 2008It feels like a homecoming: I'm among hundreds of people who live for parasites.
I arrived in Arlington Texas this afternoon to attend the annual meeting of the American Society of Parasitologists. I'm going to give a talk tomorrow about the public awareness of parasitology, talking about my long-term relationship with the beasties in books, articles, blogs, and beyond. But till then, I get to hang out with parasitologists. I've met a lot of the people here over the years, like the leech-master Mark Siddall, and I've read the work of a lot of people I'm just meeting (work on things like how…