Social Sciences
bcohen | January 10, 2008Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6
Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion
This post was written by new guest blogger Jason Delborne.*
George Cruikshank (1836), A London Audience, from Hulton Archive/Getty Images
The notion of the "public" often surfaces when we think about science. What does the public understand about science? How can we improve the scientific literacy of the public? Is there such a thing as public-interest science? How should the public hold science and scientists accountable? How do research findings affect…
drorzel | January 6, 2008
BBC NEWS | Magazine Monitor
100 things the BBC didn't know until last year.
(tags: culture politics review society science education environment humanities history)
sb admin | January 6, 2008 It's a new year, bringing new changes. I've decided to quit Omni Brain and move on to less important things, like creating baffling and somewhat offensive art and writing more books that I won't want anyone to read. It's been fun to be here, though. I'm grateful to Steve for being a terrific co-blogger, thankful to ScienceBlogs for hosting, and am glad we've all shared lots of laughs.
There's been plenty of silliness and also some seriousness. On pondering what to write in a farewell post, it seems appropriate to share a piece of writing I never really knew what to do with. It exposes the…
evolvingthoughts | January 5, 2008
Larry Arnhart has a post up on how Huck Finn's moral quandary about turning in Jim, the escaped slave, as good religion said he should (at the time), when he has come to know and admire Jim as a man, displays the evolved nature of morality. I tend to agree with this view.
Huck decides, "Very well then, I'll go to hell". Here's the entire passage, one of the greatest in English literature.
Once I said to myself it would be a thousand times better for Jim to be a slave at home where his family was, as long as he'd got to be a slave, and so I'd better write a letter to Tom Sawyer and tell…
pharyngula | January 5, 2008The NAS has a new edition of their Science, Evolution, and Creationism publication, which is a genuinely excellent piece of work. We've used the previous editions in our introductory biology course here at UMM, and if you want a short, plainly written introduction to the evidence for and importance of evolution to modern biology, I recommend it highly. It fills a niche well — it explains the science and gives a general overview for the layman without getting distracted by the details. And if $12 strains your wallet and 70 pages exceeds your attention span, you can download an 8 page summary…
drorzel | January 4, 2008
Report on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion
"In the aggregate, PhDs in the fields represented by the MLA appear to have about a 35% chance of getting tenure."
(tags: academia education humanities jobs)
Crooked Timber » » Closing the books
A list of the arguments Daniel Davies is no longer having.
(tags: politics religion economics academia education culture society war)
Physics Buzz: NOVA Tackles Hot and Cold
NOVa special on BEC, next Tuesday at 8. Don't miss it.
(tags: physics low-temperature science television)
The Box Of Paperbacks Book Club: Final Blackout by L.…
terrasig | January 4, 2008I'm very excited to announce to Terra Sig readers the kickoff of a new group blog called Science Based Medicine. Yes, it may sound odd that one would need to preface "Medicine" with the qualifier, "Science-Based," but therein lies the goal of this new resource from its mission statement:
Safe and effective health care is critical to to everyone's quality of life; so much so that it is generally considered a basic human right. The best method for determining which interventions and health products are safe and effective is, without question, good science. Therefore it is in everyone's best…
bushwells | January 4, 2008Forgive me. I'm going to channel Sally Field here by way of Shelob. I received an e-mail earlier this week notifying me that The Tolkienian War on Science (TWoS) placed second in the non-fiction category of the Middle-earth Fan Fiction Awards 2007 (MEFA). Here's my bitchin' plaque, courtesy of Rhapsody, a Tolkien aficionado who is also one of the regular readers and a commenter here at the Refuge (many thanks, R).
The backdrop of Minas Morgul is taken from Peter Jackson's The Return of the King. I figured the choice of this image is appropriate for the TWoS since science and technology…
pharyngula | January 4, 2008Those darn human rights organizations keep meddling in people's personal affairs — for instance, they think fathers and brothers shouldn't be allowed to beat or kill their wives and sisters if they have been dishonorable, and that women ought to report abuse to the police. Don't they know that violence against women is a good thing? There are perfectly good reasons for it.
Relationships between fathers and daughters or sisters and brothers also provoke argument from human rights organizations, which propose the suggested solutions for all relationships. Personally, I don't think fathers or…
thescian | January 3, 2008A summary of a forecasting (sort of) report at RealClimate:
The group imagined three potential scenarios, labeled expected, severe, and catastrophic. These are not forecasts exactly, since forecasting society is even harder than forecasting climate, which is itself pretty dicey on a regional spatial scale, but rather a fleshing out of plausible possibilities, a story-telling, visualization-type exercise.
The "expected" scenario calls for 1.3 °C of warming globally above 1990 levels, by the year 2040. Changes in precipitation and sea level prompt migration at a scale sufficient to challenge…
oracknows | January 2, 2008If the pontifications of Orac are too--shall we say?--insolent for your taste, you'll be happy to know that there's a new group blog in town designed to provide a serious "alternative" voice of reason and science to discuss the claims made in favor of "alternative" medicine. Spearheaded by Steve Novella, President of the New England Skeptical Society and active blogger at Neurologica Blog, this new effort is called Science-Based Medicine. It's manifesto starts:
Science-Based Medicine is a new daily science blog dedicated to promoting the highest standards and traditions of science in medicine…
nisbetmc | January 2, 2008Starting in the 1970s, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists began to apply their methods and theories to understanding the processes and assumptions that shape the production of scientific knowledge and technology.
These scholars argued that science does not stand apart from society as a collection of objective facts and theories, but is influenced by institutions, social norms, ideology, and even the laboratory technology that is used to observe nature. This new field of science studies offered important insight into the practice and craft of doing science while providing valuable…
evolvingthoughts | December 31, 2007
OK, so the next door party finished about 1.30, but the family disputes finished about 5 am, so instead of thinking, I'm going to let others think for me, and round up a few New Years Day links...
Wesley Elsberry at Austringer has a nice piece on why creationists use the conflict model for the relation of science and faith.
Thinking Meat asks if life was "nasty, poore, brutish and short" as Hobbes thought, or things were simply just as much about survival as they are now, in preagriculture.
PsyBlog asks how well Epicurus, one of my favourite Greek Philosophers, fares in the light of…
terrasig | December 30, 2007In rats, though. But still very interesting.
So says yesterday's New York Times Op-Ed by psychiatrist, Paul Steinberg, entitled, "The Hangover That Lasts." This timely piece follows our discussion on Friday about champagne choices for New Year's Eve, the premier event for binge-drinking.
While I'm not a neuropharmacologist, Steinberg's article piqued my interest because it focuses on the work of Dr Fulton T Crews and his former student Dr Jennifer Obernier (now with the National Academy of Sciences) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr Crews is director of the UNC Bowles…
hrynyshyn | December 24, 2007The question comprises the headline of an essay in the New Statesman from David Whitehouse, a former BBC science editor and astronomer ;;;; not someone easily dismissed as a psuedoskeptical crank. His argument getting a lot of traction, and I've even been asked "is this legit?" The answer is ...
No.
Whitehouse, of course, says it has stopped. Otherwise, he wouldn't have asked the question. But the flaw in his argument appears early in the essay:
The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 as well as every year since 2001.Global warming has, temporarily or…
gregladen | December 22, 2007Gene Expression has the second in a pair of posts on race that is worth a close look. In Why phenotypic races may not disappear, G.E. speaks of the particulate nature of inheritance in relation to culturally defined racial types (that are in turn based on appearance).
There is the idea in the minds of some that interracial relations in the most intimate sense will banish racism or racial consciousness. To me that seems unlikely, though Latin American nations do not exhibit the sort of racism based on ancestry traditional in the United States, they do retain a marked preference for those…
gregladen | December 21, 2007
Roland S. Martin is a CNN commentator who is coming late to the War on Christmas.
The name Roland Martin reminds me of Rowan and Martin. I'm pretty sure that is why Rowan S. Martin uses the "S." .. so people don't think of Rowan and Martin when they hear his name.
Rowan and Martin were funny in their day. Roland S. Martin is not funny. Yet it is hard to not laugh at the guy.
In a recent commentary, Martin whines ...
Because of all the politically correct idiots, we are being encouraged to stop saying "Merry Christmas" for the more palatable "Happy Holidays." What the heck are "…
nisbetmc | December 21, 2007
A X-Mas Goracle
In an editorial in the latest issue of the journal Climatic Change, Simon Donner argues that scientists need to join with religious leaders in communicating the urgency of climate change. Donner is an assistant professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on climate change, coral reefs, and nutrient cycling.
Following the lead of older avant-garde communicators such as Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson and EO Wilson, Donner is one of many among a new generation of scientists who recognize that a paradigm shift is needed for engaging the…
razib | December 20, 2007In response to my post Mixed-race but homogeneous appearance? several individuals mooted the possibility that admixture may result in the vanishing of race as a social construct. Actually, I don't think this is the true. To the left is a photo from my post Can you tell if you're black or white? where I explored the genetics of a case where two black-white biracial parents produced fraternal twin daughters of disparate appearance. While one sister seemed to favor her African ancestors in look, another sister seemed to resemble her European forebears. Across the full sample space of their…
cmooney | December 20, 2007Winter travel sucks. And I'm doing it anyway.
After spending more or less all of December getting myself as settled as possible here in LA, I now must venture out again next month--and the one after that. Specifically, I'll be in North Carolina, Louisiana, Missouri, and Florida. More details:
Saturday, January 19, 3:45 PM-4:45 PM
"Changing Minds through Science Communication: a Panel on Framing Science"
NC Science Blogging Conference
Sigma Xi Center
Research Triangle Park, NC
Wednesday, January 23, 8:30 AM-12:00 PM
"Seventh Communications Workshop: The Science of Communications--What We Know…