purepedantry | April 17, 2008Yesterday I took a day off (first in a while for me), and I had a chance to see the movie Smart People starring Randy Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Ellen Page.
The movie is about a rather odd literature professor, Lawrence Wetherhold, (Quaid) who is exhausted by the difficulties of academic life. His oft-obnoxious daughter (Page) obsesses over getting into college and feels superior to others due to her intelligence -- as is clearly evidenced by her high SAT scores. Wetherhold is a widower, and since the death of his wife he has been supported by his daughter. When he falls…
purepedantry | April 16, 2008Wow. I just saw the Expelled TV ads start on CNN of all places.
What an obnoxious piece of a tripe.
One, the theory of evolution has never claimed to explain how life emerged from non-life. It is a theory to explain how species emerge from other species. Get your facts straight dumbass.
Second, I am toying with the notion of actually seeing the film this weekend. My friends and me were going to play a drinking game where we drink every time Stein utters some ham-fisted half-truth. I am just a little concerned that we are all going to die of alcohol toxicity.
purepedantry | April 16, 2008Nature News is reporting on a paper that just came out in PNAS. The paper, Coates and Herbert, correlates the daily profits and trading volatility of traders in London. They argue that changes in these hormone may be responsible for changes in trader profits and market volatility.
Let's file this paper under "wildly over-interpreted" because there are some big caveats that you have to remember before you can make a claim anything like that.
Coates and Herbert measured morning levels of testosterone and daily levels of cortisol (average of two measurements) in 17 male traders in the City of…
purepedantry | April 15, 2008Greg Mankiw linked to this article in the Washington Post by experimental philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. Appiah points out that whether you think a tax system is equitable is determined partly by whether it is framed as a loss or a gain:
In the 1970s, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling used to put some questions to his students at Harvard when he wanted to show how people's ethical preferences on public policy can be turned around. Suppose, he said, that you were designing a tax code and wanted to provide a credit -- a rebate, in effect -- for couples with children. (I'm…
purepedantry | April 10, 2008On my books to read list, Bonk by Mary Roach explores the cross-overs between science and sex. She is interviewed by NPR here. (Hat-tip: Daily Zeitgeist)
Also on NPR, does teeth whitening using light actually work? Not better than at-home gels say some researchers:
Chemist Lee Hansen, a professor emeritus at Brigham Young University, explains there was an assumption that heat from the light served as a catalyst to decompose the bleaching gel.
"That's the theory behind it," says Hansen. But he found the lights don't generate enough heat or give off enough UV light to accelerate the chemical…
purepedantry | April 9, 2008I saw this news story in Nature a couple days ago about finding a gene for "ruthlessness." I realized that I always say the same thing about these behavioral genetics stories -- stories where they claim to find a gene for ____ (where blank is a behavioral abstraction like empathy). These studies are notoriously misinterpreted by the media, so I figure I will reiterate some caveats to remember about them.
In this study, Knafo et al. compared performance in the Dictator game to genotype for a particular allele of the vasopressin receptor AVPR1a.
In the Dictator game -- which isn't much of a…
kateseip | April 9, 2008As a research studying maternal behavior, I come across a lot of sex & reproduction research. As a (very) general rule of thumb, most small mammals are either sexually receptive or parentally responsive - your sex circuits remain on until you have offspring to tend to, at which point your parental circuit overrides your sex circuit so that you can tend full-time to your kids. These opposing mechanisms are evolutionarily strategic - it's bad form to be out reproducing with wanton members of the opposite sex while you should be taking care of your kids back in the nest - your kids are…
kateseip | April 8, 2008Despite the stacks of research that I've had wonderful intentions of blogging on for a while now (one dealing with the origins of elephant testes, to Jake's delight), a brief post today will have to suffice.
You see things like this, and your heart just swells.
Anonymous Philanthropist Donates 200 Human Kidneys To Hospital
Bonus: I know the news anchor!
purepedantry | April 7, 2008Methinks this article from the NYTimes is a tad hysterical:
They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece -- not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.
A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.
Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the…
purepedantry | April 4, 2008I didn't have much to do this afternoon, so I played hookie and went down to the FIRST Robotics Competition. The competition pits bands of high school students (and their engineer/mentors) in a contest to see who can build the best robot for an assigned task. At the moment the local competition (the national competition is in Georgia, I think) is going on in the Javits center in Manhattan.
This convention is a true festivus of geekiness. I kid you not: I have never seen such a raucous bunch of robotics nerds in my life. It was like the party scene from Real Genius. At one point the…
purepedantry | April 3, 2008You have got to be friggin' kidding me!?
Kathleen Seidel, blogger at neurodiversity.com, has been subpoenaed by Rev. Lisa Sykes and Seth Sykes to appear in their case against the Bayer company. Their case alleges that mercury additives to vaccines caused their son's autism.
Now Seidel is a blogger who has taken repeated issue with both the theory that mercury in vaccines causes autism and their tactics in pressing this position. It would appear that a recent post -- The Commerce in Causation which details the particularly slimy behavior of one Mr. Clifford Shoemaker, a personal injury…
purepedantry | April 2, 2008What an astonishingly useful graphic (click to enlarge, source):
Richard Florida (author of one of the most interesting books I have ever read) comments on the gender disparity in singles:
By far, the best places for single men are the large cities and metro areas of the East Coast and Midwest. The extreme is greater New York, where single women outnumber single men by more than 210,000. In the Philadelphia area and greater Washington, D.C., single women outnumber single men by 50,000. I met my wife outside Detroit, where the odds were greatly stacked in my favor - single women outnumber…
purepedantry | April 2, 2008How do neurons in your brain encode the diversity of stimuli present in the world? This is one of the questions that neuroscientists have to answers about how the brain works. The world holds an infinite array of things to see, hear, touch, etc., yet your brain only has a finite number of neurons to encode them. How is this infinite diversity assimilated by a machine with finite components?
To address this issue, I want to talk about Hromadka et al. publishing in the journal PLoS Biology. Hromadka et al. perform electrical recordings in the auditory cortex of unanesthetized rats. (The…
purepedantry | April 1, 2008Encephalon is up at Of Two Minds, Paris Hilton-style.
Automatic External Defibrillators (AEDs) do not improve mortality at home. This contrasts AEDs in public places. The authors of the paper, in NEJM, attribute the difference to a much larger population who can use them in public spaces and greater training in their use. Covered in the NYTimes here. The paper is here.
Chris Anderson writes in the Boston Globe about the consequences of the Massachusetts health care plan (Hat-tip: Kevin, MD):
With its massive cost overruns and missed deadlines, the healthcare reform law is quickly becoming…
purepedantry | March 31, 2008Go read this post at Language Log. It is about race as a confound in interpreting psychological differences between the sexes:
On the other hand, the samples used in sex-differences research are often quite small, and are not in general demographically balanced. We wouldn't trust pollsters who claimed to characterize gender differences in the American electorate based on a sample of, say, 20 UCLA medical students.
More on this at Mind Hacks.
purepedantry | March 31, 2008From NPR this morning:
Students at the University of Texas at San Antonio were determined to uphold standards at their school. They wrote an honor code that discouraged both cheating and plagiarizing. But they weren't going to waste a lot of time writing the darn thing themselves. The wording of a draft of the honor code appears to match the honor code at Brigham Young University. The student in charge of the project says the lack of a proper citation was just an oversight.
Whoops. Not saying it was intentional, but if you are going to write something on plagiarism, make sure to use…
purepedantry | March 31, 2008Farris et al. have a paper coming out in Psychological Science about how men tend to misperceive sexual interest in women. I get the sense that this is a big problem for many women. Any woman who has spent more than 30 seconds in a bar has had at least one random yo-yo hit on them despite what they perceive as clear negative signals. So I am happy that someone is addressing this issue.
I do have a couple concerns about this paper, but let's leave those til the end.
Farris et al. sought to distinguish between two theories about how men misperceive sexual interest from women:
Two main…
purepedantry | March 27, 2008The Biggest Toy Theory of Scientific endeavor: Science is not driven by curiosity or the desire for fame. Rather it is driven by the desire to accumulate bigger and more complex scientific gadgets. By this standard, particle physicists are gods walking among us. And if those gadgets could be used to irradiate a squirrel from a thousand miles a way, so much the better for all of us.
Exhibit A: The Large Hadron Collider (Click to enlarge)
purepedantry | March 27, 2008Last night, I saw Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) speak.
(I joined this speakers club called the Oxonian Society -- which despite its name is not restricted to Oxford alumni. Why? What can I say. I was bored, and it is cheaper than internet dating. Hopefully, the people I meet will be more reliably intelligent and less reliably absurd.)
Anyway, Sen. Specter has been touring around touting his new book, Never Give In: Battling Cancer in the Senate which discusses his battle with Hodgkin's lymphoma while dealing with a variety of controversial political issues such as judicial confirmations and…