drorzel | October 18, 2007I'm not sure whether it was prompted by James Watson's little outburst (for which he has apologized "unreservedly") or just serendipity, but Cosma Shalizi offers an exhaustive demolition of the idea of a single general intelligence factor:
Anyone who wanders into the bleak and monotonous desert of IQ and the
nature-vs-nurture dispute eventually gets trapped in the especially arid
question of what, if anything, g, the supposed general factor of
intelligence, tells us about these matters. By calling g a
"statistical myth" before, I
made clear my conclusion, but none of my reasoning. This…
drorzel | October 18, 2007While we're being all charitable, here's a link to FreeRice's charity vocabulary quiz. It's pretty simple: They give you odd words, you guess the meanings, and for each word you get right, they donate 10 grains of rice to an international aid agency.
Do you have a large vocabulary? Are you looking for an Internet-based way to waste time? Well, here's a way to make that work for you.
(FreeRice link via a mailing list.)
drorzel | October 18, 2007So, let's review the week in DonorsChoose fundraising:
Atheist baiting netted about $60, from three donors.
Appealing to your better nature brought in zip, zero, nil, nada. Not one person donated to the highlighted proposal after I posted that.
Offering to stab myself with a fork brought in $200 yesterday.
You all suck.
No, that's not true-- your generosity has been very impressive. The Uncertain Principles challenge currently stands at $3,118 raised, from 39 donors, second among ScienceBlogs, after Pharyngula, which gets more than 20 times as many pageviews as this blog. I'm flattered to…
drorzel | October 18, 2007Over at The Island of Doubt, James Hrynyshyn has a post about solar skepticism on the part of some researchers, who think that claims of increased efficiency are often overhyped.
Of course, efficiency isn't the only issue. A couple of weks ago, we had a colloquium talk by Peter Persans of RPI, who is working on developing new types of solar cells using amorphous silicon and "quantum dots." He opened the talk with a fairly sobering description of the energy situation, though, which really puts the challenge of solar energy into perspective.
As best I can reconstruct it, the argument went like…
drorzel | October 17, 2007
Hopkins Is Boeheim's Designated Successor at Syracuse - New York Times
Bernie Fine: Don't hold your breath, Mike...
(tags: basketball)
yoco :: College Basketball || (a sports weblog) analysis and commentary on college basketball and the ncaa tournament
Georgie suspends three players for missing classes. Would they do this to the football team?
(tags: basketball football)
slacktivist: Gay-Hatin' Gospel (pt. 1)
Fred Clark looks at some possible explanations for the rampant gay-bashing among evangelicals.
(tags: religion US politics culture)
On being a scientist and a woman : Teaching…
drorzel | October 17, 2007Separated at birth?
James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in the unravelling of DNA who now runs one of America's leading scientific research institutions, drew widespread condemnation for comments he made ahead of his arrival in Britain today for a speaking tour at venues including the Science Museum in London.
The 79-year-old geneticist reopened the explosive debate about race and science in a newspaper interview in which he said Western policies towards African countries were wrongly based on an assumption that black people were as clever as their white counterparts when "testing…
drorzel | October 17, 2007My least favorite part of academic research has to be waiting for vendors who aren't actually going to call me back. Even when it's a company I've done a lot of business with, "a lot of business" by my standards is peanuts to them, so I'm way, way down the priority queue when it comes to callbacks.
In order to really get anything done, I need to call the vendor, and get an actual human on the line. Leaving voice mail messages really doesn't do any good. And yet, I feel like an asshole calling them every hour on the hour trying to get through to the one person in the company who knows where…
drorzel | October 17, 2007That's exactly the sort of thing you won't have to read if I meet my Challenge goal by Friday. Or even get $1000 or 100 new donors by Friday, in which case I'll have to do a respectful review of his book.
Thus far, we've only picked up $120 in new donations, so it's not looking real likely. But, hey, a sudden surge of generosity could put it over the top... So why not donate?
drorzel | October 17, 2007Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau has encountered the dark side of academic life:
I was assigned to the curriculum committee, so I went to the meeting today. (I don't go to committee meetings for my health.) I learned that one of the tasks before us was demonstrating that we have assessments to show that introductory physics courses satisfy the University's "quantitative science" requirement.
Now, I know what you're thinking: HOW THE HELL COULD PHYSICS NOT BE A QUANTITATIVE SCIENCE? Well, I got past that. I had told myself that I would just accept the bullshit and do whatever needs to be…
drorzel | October 17, 2007In comments to my previous fundraising incentive offer, tceisele asks a good question:
Just out of curiosity: if you will read "The God Delusion" for $1000 [in donations], how much will it cost just to get you to stab yourself with a fork?
(based on my statement that I'd rather stab myself with a fork than read The God Delusion).
It is, as I said, a good question, and deserves a good answer: $750. For $750 in new donations by the end of the day Friday, I'll stab myself with a fork.
drorzel | October 16, 2007
Crooked Timber » » Political science and economics
High-level discussion of the economics Nobel
(tags: Nobel economics politics academia)
Mixing Memory : Women in Math, Science, and Engineering: Is It About the Numbers (And Not the Ones You Might Think)?
Notes on the science of "social identity threat."
(tags: psychology science gender academia)
Likelihood of Burst Appendix Tied to Insurance - New York Times
Insurance: topping the list of industries that need to be blown up and started over.
(tags: medicine politics economics science)
Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education…
drorzel | October 16, 2007Via a mailing list, the Gingerbread Haka:
If you don't get the joke, there's a video of the original below the fold, with bonus shirtless ruggers:
There are dozens of other versions on YouTube, including one with French subtitles, if you really want to know what they're chanting. It's a pre-game tradition for the New Zealand All-Blacks, based on a Maori dance.
It's worth watching a couple of them, just for the "What the...?" looks on the faces of the opposing sides, who have to stand there and watch this.
drorzel | October 16, 2007Continuing the theme of highlighting the occasional particularly worthy proposal, have a look at "Better Viewing for Students", which pretty much encapsulates everything you need to know about the reasons for the fundraising drive. The proposal is asking for money to buy an overhead projector for classroom use-- not a computer projector, an old-school overhead.
Why would anybody want that? Well, there's some educational jargon to justify it, but the real reason is here:
What makes these needs more pressing is the fact that traditional teaching can not take place in my classroom. The…
drorzel | October 16, 2007OK, the monkey business may have been a little too abstract for a good audience participation entry. So let's fall back on a classic:
What science-related superpower would you most like to have?
Because this is a Dorky Poll, "science-related superpower" here means a supernatural ability that is useful for doing science. Because battling crime is passé.
Personally, I think I'd have to go with the ability to manipulate small objects remotely. I'm a big guy, and I have big hands, and you know what they say about big guys with big hands...
That's right, they have a lot of trouble turning screws…
drorzel | October 16, 2007ScienceBlogs has just redesigned the main site. Sort of. The change is subtle enough that you might not notice it-- the only real difference on the front page is that the "channel" list has been reorganized-- it's now slightly shorter, and some old channels have been combined into new ones.
There are two practical advantages to this: on the back end of things, this allows the individual bloggers to put a post in two channels at the same time, which is great for things that straddle the boundary between two areas. Also, the new channel pages feature pictures, with the Physical Science page…
drorzel | October 15, 2007
Edge-Serpentine Gallery: FORMULAE FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
Equations as art objects (via Cosmic Variance)
(tags: science art blogs)
Marginal Revolution: Mechanism Design for Grandma
The Economics Nobel explained
(tags: economics Nobel news)
drorzel | October 15, 2007At the time of this writing (about 8:20 on Monday), my DonorsChoose challenge entry stands at $2,802, nearly double last year's take. That's outstanding, and I thank everyone who contributed.
Of course, I set a Challenge goal of $6,000, which means we're not quite halfway there. Which means I need to come up with some new way to solicit donations. History suggests that self-abasement often works, and local history shows that "new atheists" are a rich source of cash, so something along those lines would be good. Sadly, there isn't a local equivalent of the Creation Museum, and I'm not about to…
drorzel | October 15, 2007This is the famous carving of the Three Wise Monkeys on the stable at the Nikko Tosho-gu:
Looking at that suggests a possible question for a non-dorky poll, analogous to the dork classic "what superpower would you want?":
If you could go through life either seeing no evil, hearing no evil, or speaking no evil, which would you pick?
(It's non-dorky because it's a question of ethics and morals, and there's nothing dorky about ethics and morals...)
It would sort of depend in the mechanism by which evil went unseen or unheard-- if it involved some sort of evil suppression field in your…
drorzel | October 15, 2007In the spirit of the newly clarified regulations governing the Academic Competitiveness Grant and National Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent (SMART) Grant Programs administered by the Department of Education, I am pleased to announce the Uncertain Principles Physics Scholarship Program. Under this program, I pledge to personally pay the full tuition for any student who is:
From a low-income family, or a historically disadvantaged group,
Enrolled as a full-time student at an accredited four-year college or university, and
Taking courses toward a degree in physics or related…
drorzel | October 15, 2007The weekend interrupted the parade of Nobel prizes, setting apart The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2007, more commonly called the Nobel in Economics (even though it's a late addition). This goes to three guys in the US, including the obligatory Chicagoan: Leonid Hurwicz, Eric S. Maskin, and Roger B. Myerson, "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory." As the official press release puts it:
Mechanism design theory, initiated by Leonid Hurwicz and further developed by Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson, has greatly enhanced our…