Search Content

Displaying results 74001 - 74050 of 87950

Learning the bash shell, continued

This is a repost of a review that is timely, given this week's focus on setting up your Linux server and changing all your computers over to Linux and so on. I started this discussion a while back, and now it is time to continue it. The Bourne Again Shell, bash, is the default command-line shell in Ubuntu and many *nix (Unix, Linux, etc.) systems. You can think of the shell as the most direct way to get into your operating system, and you can think of shell scripts ('programs' in essence) as macros that can automate computerized tasks. For the present purposes, I'm discussing the book…

How can you tell a Christian is lying? His mouth is moving.

Do not look at his unless you've been baptized. Oh shit, too late. There are a lot of Christians that I trust, and love. But that is because of who they are. If I just know that someone is a Christian, especially if they are the sort of person to wear their Christianity on their sleeve, uttering "praise god" and telling me "bless you " and "I'm so blessed" and so on, then I tend to not trust them. Why? Because there is a very good chance that their priorities are such that telling me, or anyone else, the truth on a day to day basis is just not as important as certain other things…

Sunday Chess Problem

This is the first of what I hope to make a regular feature here at EvolutionBlog: A chess problem for Sunday. By “chess problem” I do not mean the sort of thing where I show you a position from an actual game and ask you to find the best line of play for one side or the other. Those are fun too, but that is not what I will be showing here. Rather, I have in mind composed positions that illustrate an attractive and pretty idea. Chess composition is an art form that uses the rules of chess as its medium. Many chess players are disdainful of composition, since it has little to do with…

P. Z. Myers Needs to Get Out of the Movie Review Business

A while back P. Z. Myers wrote a snotty, obnoxious post about how much he hated the big Les Miz movie. Now, I happen to be a bit protective of Les Miserables. I regard the original novel as the finest ever written, and I think the stage version of the musical does a good job of capturing the novel's spirit (far better than any of the many non-musical movie versions). The movie musical certainly had its problems (Click here for my review), but overall it was pretty good. If it was truly the worst movie experience of his life, as P. Z. claimed, then I must assume that he sees only the very…

Midgley Summons Plagues

In other news, philosopher Mary Midgley offers some thoughts on the proper way to respond to ID. The title: A Plague on Both Their Houses. You can probably guess what's coming, especially if you're aware of Midgley's history with Richard Dawkins (more on that later). If you're expecting Midgley to decry equally people like Dawkins who liken evolution to atheism and religious fundamentalists who promote creationism and ID, then you would be right. Which is already a bad sign. Even if you sincerely believe that evolution and religion are compatible and that people like Dawkins are guilty of…

Warren on Atheism

Meanwhile, just in case you were looking for something truly stupid, go gawk in amazement at this column by David Warren of The Ottawa Citizen. Here's the opening: I get such apoplectic letters, whenever I write about “evolutionism,” that I really can't resist writing about it again. This is not, of course, because I have any desire to tease such correspondents. Perish the thought. Rather, when a writer finds he has hit such a nerve, he can also know that he is approaching a great truth. Wow! That's total amatuer hour. Anytime you're reading a columnist who boasts that the negative…

The Day Without Yesterday

One of the nice things about being a Big Shot science blogger is that sometimes people are willing to send you free copies of their books. One such person is John Farrell, who graciously sent me a copy of his book The Day Without Yesterday: Lematire, Einstein and the Birth of Modern Cosmology, published by Thunder's Mouth Press. He sent me the book some time ago, and I owe him an apology for taking so long to review it. This is a really excellent book. It is a combination of biography, focusing particularly on the often ignored Georges Lemaitre, and science popularization. The book traces…

Education Is Chaotic

While I'm quoting other people saying smart things, Timothy Burke has another great post on the failures of economic models of higher education There is a lot of information that you could acquire about courses or about colleges that you could reasonably use to assemble a decision matrix. What size is the class or the college? Do you have a good reason for thinking that you flourish in small or large classes or institutions? What do you think you need in terms of knowledge or training? What kinds of environments and teaching styles do you enjoy or find stimulating? And so on–this often…

Rearrangements of Series

Blake Stacey directed me towards a terrific tool for embedding TeX code into a web page. So how about we do ourselves a math post! Remember the harmonic series? No doubt you encountered it in some calculus class or other. It's the one that goes like this: $$ 1+\frac{1}{2}+\frac{1}{3}+\frac{1}{4}+\frac{1}{5}+\frac{1}{6}+\dots $$   The series is divergent. If you keep adding more and more of the terms your running tally will just get bigger and bigger forever. There are many ways to show that it is divergent. If you remember your calculus then you know there is a little gadget…

Miller, Giberson Spank Back

If you saw my post the other day about Jerry Coyne's review of the recent books by Ken Miller and Karl Giberson, then you might also be interested to know that Miller and Giberson have now replied. Click here for Miller's reply, and click here for Giberson's. Let's look at Giberson, first: Empirical science does indeed trump revealed truth about the world as Galileo and Darwin showed only too clearly. But empirical science also trumps other empirical science. Einstein's dethronement of Newton was not the wholesale undermining of the scientific enterprise, even though it showed that science…

What Do You Need to Make a Quantum Computer?

(This is the second of two background posts for a peer-reviewed research blogging post that has now slipped to tomorrow. I started writing it, but realized that it needed some more background information, which became this post. And now I don't have time to write the originally intended post...) Making a quantum computer is a tricky business. The process of quantum computing requires the creation of both superposition states of individual quantum bits (in which the "qubit" is in some mixture of "0" and "1" at the same time) and also entangled states of different qubits (states where the state…

A saga of two prelims

For this month's Scientiae, Candid Engineer has asked for stories about overcoming challenges. ScienceWoman has already contributed an awesome story to the Diversity in Science carnival, but I think it does for Scientiae, too. What about my own story? Prior to my current job, my biggest soul-searching career-related moment was when I didn't pass my prelim exam in 2005. Ugh. In retrospect, I think I was taking the prelim pretty casually. I had written my ~100 page, 3 chapter research proposal document, and none of my dissertation committee advisors had raised a hair about it. I had never…

Selfless monkeys find personal reward in helping others

There are some who say that helping others is its own reward, and many biologists would agree. The fact that selfless acts give us a warm glow is evident from personal experience and neurological studies, which find that good deeds trigger activity in parts of the brain involved in feelings of reward. But feeling food by being good isn't just the province of humans - monkeys too get a kick out of the simple act of giving to their fellow simians. At the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Frans de Waal's team of scientists have been investigating the selfless side of eight brown capuchin…

Breaking the Link - Darwinius revealed as ancestor of nothing

Cast your mind back to June, when a stunning fossil animal called Darwinius (alternatively Ida or "The Link") was unveiled to the world to tremendous pomp and circumstance. Hyperbolic ads declared the day of Ida's discovery as the most important for 47 million years. A press release promised that she would "change everything", headlines proclaimed her a "missing link in evolution" and the scientists behind the discovery billed her as "the closest thing we can get to a direct ancestor". And according to a new study, none of that is true. Mere months later, Erik Seiffert from Stony Brook…

The fall and rise of lefties in Victorian England

And now for something completely different... This is a repost with a difference - it's an edited interview I did with London scientist Chris McManus way back in September 2007. This has a fond place in my heart, for it was the first proper freelance writing assigment that I did after winning the Telegraph's Science Writer award. This is where all the cool freelancing began. It was originally published on Nature Network, but I note that their news archives have disappeared. As such, here it is again. McManus, a Professor of Psychology and Medical Education at UCL, is an expert on asymmetry…

Erasing a memory reveals the neurons that encode it

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about propranolol, a drug that can erase the emotion of fearful memories.  When volunteers take the drug before recalling a scary memory about a spider, it dulled the emotional sting of future recollections. It's not, however, a mind-wiping pill in the traditional science-fiction sense, and it can't erase memories as was so widely reported by the hysterical mainstream media. The research that's published today is a different story. Jin-Hee Han from the University of Toronto has indeed found a way to erase a specific fearful memory, but despite the superficial…

Harry Potter and the Tremendous F***-up.

Or: Deconstructing Dumbledore. (Major and serious spoilers for Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows follow. In fact if you haven't read them this will make very little sense.) There's a lot of villains in the Harry Potter series. They are young and old, male and female, human and otherwise, magical and muggle. They range from indolent and reformable pests to soul-sucking embodiments of death personified. Not all of them set out to be bad. Some are good people who made bad choices; some are power-mad petty bureaucrats. But if you want to pick out the single person who caused the most…

SquinT Live Blogging - Friday Talks

Live blogging from day one of the talks at SquInT 2008. Updated as the day goes along. So hit that refresh button :) In a sign that history may be warping itself into a cirlce, the first speaker of the day was Serge Haroche, who was the first speaker at the first SqUinT conference ten years ago. Close time like curves anyone? Haroche talked about quantum nondemolition measurements of a photon number in a cavity (see 0707.3880.) A quantum nondemolition measurement is a measurement of eigenstates which commutes with the free evolution of the quantum system (thus only external interactions…

Breathing Space: On the Historical Connections of Allergies and Landscapes, with Author Gregg Mitman

Part 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 - - - The World's Fair is pleased to offer the following discussion about Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes (Yale University Press, 2007), with its author Gregg Mitman. Prof. Mitman is Interim Director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and William Coleman Professor of History of Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also a professor in the Department of Medical History and the Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science & Technology Studies. If you were to ask how one could hold together so many…

Don't you just hate the difference between seeing things 'as they are' and 'as they ought to be'?

Preface | 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 Richard Powers, in his debut novel Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, constructs a story about the identity of the three farmers in August Sander's 1914 photograph of that name. The novel takes on not just the three farmers, but three storylines too. The many characters in his three-thread narrative each, in some way, contribute to the larger story about technology, photography, philosophy, and knowledge. I've touched on as much in earlier parts to this…

The Myers-Dawkins Incident: Can't we all just get along?

(How do I know that it is a bad idea to say anything about this. Oh well. Here goes.) ScienceBlogs regulars will know that last week there was a tiny incident involving a prescreening of the movie Expelled! -- a documentary starring Ben Stein purporting to expose the exclusion of pro-Intelligent Design advocates from academia. The pre-screening occurred in Minneapolis at a time coinciding with a large meeting of atheists including PZ Myers of the ScienceBlog Pharyngula and Richard Dawkins. Both of them having been interviewed -- and having been lied to about the nature of the film --…

Visualizing the Cell Cycle

You have got to see this video. Sakaue-Sawano et al. may have created the coolest molecular biology video I have ever seen. They developed a system of reporters to watch the cells transition between the different stages of the cell cycle. This is cool, but it is going to take a bit of explaining to understand why. Background All cells go through a cycle of steps in order to replicate their DNA and divide into two new cells. This cycle is called the cell cycle, and it is characterized by the presence of certain tightly coordinated proteins during each particular stage. I am referring to…

Global Warming: Cretaceous Quote-Mining

There's nothing more grating for a science writer than see your work get cut and pasted to give people precisely the wrong impression. My latest irritation: "Ten Questions For Al Gore and the Global Warming Crowd", which appeared Friday on the conservative web site Townhall.com. The author is John Hawkins, who describes himself as a professional blogger who runs Right Wing News. Hawkins claims that he is skeptical that humans are causing global warming because, in his words, "'the Earth-is-going-to-burn-us-alive' crowd cannot answer the most basic questions about the theory that they…

Attractors All the Way Up: Metastability, Rostrocaudal Hierarchies, and Synaptic Facilitation

In their wonderful Neuroimage article, Braun & Mattia present a comprehensive introduction to the possible neuronal implementations and cognitive sequelae of a particular dynamical phenomenon: the attractor state. In another excellent paper, just recently out in Frontiers, Itskov, Hansel and Tsodyks describe how such attractor dynamics may be insufficient to support working memory processing unless supplemented by rapid synaptic modification - a mechanism which has in fact been described neuroanatomically and previously utilized neurocomputationally to describe cognitive phenomena. To…

Remembering To Remember: Prospective Memory

In the middle of the work day, you realize you'll need to stop at a store on your way home from work. Your ability to actually do so, hours later, relies on what some psychologists call "prospective memory." Although prospective memory is clearly important for human intelligence, very little is known about how it works. Clearly there are at least two kinds of prospective memory. In the example above, you may tell yourself "stop at the store" again and again until you pull into the store's parking lot - this is known as a vigilance or monitoring strategy. Or the store may simply catch your…

Risky Business

When I wrote earlier about Steve Milloy, I commented on his attack on a study that found that the introduction safe-storage laws was followed by a 23% reduction in unintentional shooting deaths of children. Milloy claimed: The reported 23% decrease in injuries is a pretty weak result-probably beyond the capability of the ecologic type of study to reliably detect. Even in the better types of epidemiology studies (i.e., cohort and case-control), rate increases of less than 100% (and rate decreases of less than 50%) are very suspect. Milloy repeats this…

Friday Cephalopod: Force of arms

Who among you has taught or studied vertebrate anatomy? I have. It's cool. Skeletal and muscular anatomy are weird, though, because we so take the principles for granted that we're often not aware of it. We can move because we have a jointed framework, a collection of levers that are moved by the contractions of muscle fibers, which have distinctive attachments and insertions via tendons on those bones (or, in some cases, the muscles attach to sheets of connective tissue called fascia). The musculoskeletal part of anatomy classes consists of a lot of memorization of muscles, their origins…

Dr. Michael Egnor: Neurosurgeon, Stony Brook Faculty, and all around Dishonest Twit

I've been dealing with creationists for a long time now, and I thought that I'd gotten over being surprised by dishonest behavior in their ranks. In fact, I thought I'd gotten over it even when I'm on the receiving end of the false witness, and when the person dishing it out is someone who really should know better. As it turns out, I might not have quite as far over it as I thought. As regular readers know, Dr. Michael Egnor is one of the more impressively credentialed denizens of the Discovery Institute's media complaints blog. He has decades of experience as a neurosurgeon. He's on the…

Friday Bookshelf: An Ecology of Enchantment

Earlier this year I reviewed Douglas Tallamy's Bringing Nature Home, which inspired me to convert my garden to all or mostly native plants. I swore this year would be a much better gardening year than last. Visions of gardening glory danced in my head. Ah, early spring. Now we are baking in the heat of high summer and my garden sadly disappoints, even as passers-by comment on how much they enjoy looking at it. Yes, I think, if only you could see what it should look like! One-third of the natives I planted this spring, supposedly so well adapted to our climate and soil, have already…

Leaky Pipelines, Or Locked Doors?

Tim left this comment over at Uncertain Principles on Chad's post The Pipeline Problem: I thought the data was pretty clear about this: past high school, the [physics] pipeline is no more leaky for women than it is for men...here's the Report: Read it for yourselves. Examination of the academic "pipeline" reveals that women disproportionately leave physics between taking it in high school and earning a bachelor's degree. While almost half of high school physics students are girls, less that one-fourth of bachelor's degrees in physics are earned by women. After this initial "leak" in the…

On disbelief

Repost from the old blog: This week I am an Eighth Day Agnostic, as recent reformers in my irreligion have decided that we also don't know what a week is. My sermon for today begins with a question: When did it become possible to be an atheist? On Friday I attended an interesting PhD confirmation seminar on the Marquis de Sade. Apart from a nice dirty graphic used as the backdrop, rather distractingly, for the PowerPoint presentation, there was little or no actual sex or sadism. Mostly the discussion centred on what it was that de Sade intended to be doing with his libertine ways. The…

On the incoherence of "Darwinism"

For a long time now, I have had troubles with the use of the word "Darwinism". Not just by creationists and antiscience advocates like IDevotees, but by scientists themselves. You routinely see press releases and book titles that declare the death or some fatal illness of Darwinism, which, in every case, their own theoretical or experimental contributions points up. It is time, I think, to lose the word entirely. The term has a history that is itself confusing and contradictory. Let's consider some of the things it has been used to denote: 1. Transmutation of species 1.1 Gradually (…

Evolution of Hormone Signaling

Last week, I received some delusional e-mail from Phil Skell, who claims that modern biology has no use for evolutionary theory. This will raise hysterical screeches from its true-believers. But, instead they should take a deep breath and tell us how the theory is relevant to the modern biology. For examples let them tell the relevance of the theory to learning…the discovery and function of hormones…[long list of scientific disciplines truncated] Dr Skell is a sad case. He apparently repeats his mantra that biology has no need of evolution everywhere he goes, and has never bothered to…

Debating Ron Bailey and Wesley Smith, Part I

The three way debate/discussion on science and politics hosted by the Smith Family Foundation on Tuesday night was an interesting event, to say the least. It was in some ways a difficult discussion for me, because the other participants, Ronald Bailey and Wesley Smith, are much more inclined than I to mix it up about the ethics of different kinds of research, especially when it comes to future biomedical advances and whether they should go forward without restriction. I, on the other hand, simply take the stance that while ethical viewpoints may differ, that's no excuse for either side to…

Avian intelligence

In the English language, the term "bird brain" is often used in reference to intellectually challenged individuals. This is, of course, based on the notion that birds are dim-witted creatures whose behaviour is largely based on instinct. The main assumption is that a six-layered neocortex, like that of humans, is a prerequisite for anything that might be classed as intelligent, and even ornithologists have generally believed that, because they have a "smooth" brain, birds aren't too clever. However, it has in recent years become clear that we have grossly underestimated the cognitive…

Wombs, Waxes, and Wonder Cabinets (bioephemera archive)

The following is my most popular post, by far, from the "old" bioephemera (originally published Jan 5, 2007). I'll do a repost each week for the next few weeks to give new readers a taste of the blog. . . Anatomical Teaching Model of a Pregnant Woman Stephan Zick, 1639-1715 Wood and ivory Kunstkammer Georg Laue is a Munich antique/art gallery informed by the sensibility of the "wonder cabinets" (kunst- or wunder-kammer) of 17th century Germany. One of the interesting objects described on the site is this ivory model of a pregnant woman with removable parts, including internal organs and a…

Fake Poster Trilogy: Rat Motor Neurons Predict the Stock Market

Along with Shelley, I am a graduate student in the Neuroscience Program at UM. The last three years my labmates and I have made a trilogy of satirical neuroscience posters poking mild fun at the mystical art of brain science. Shelley has kindly invited me to write on said trilogy. Also in any spare time remaining I punish myself with some rather difficult neural engineering experiments. (Tim Marzullo) Episode 1: Spurious Correlations You know the experience. To quote Allen Ginsburg, "everybody's serious but me." You walk around the massive meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, with 30,000…

Eugene Volokh on Alternative Justifications for Abortion Rights

Eugene Volokh has written an article in the Harvard Law Review arguing that abortion is constitutional. This is not shocking. The Supreme Court has made clear that abortion is constitutional. However, he is arguing -- rather than from the point of view of right to privacy -- abortion to save a woman's life is constitution because of the right to self-defense: Three women lie in adjoining hospital rooms. A fourth lives a block away. All are in deadly peril. Alice is seven months pregnant, and the pregnancy threatens her life. Her fetus has long been viable, so she no longer has the Roe/…

Recovered Memories: Forgetting What We've Remembered?

One of my near obsessions in cognitive science is the recovered memories debate. Not only has it been one of the most contentious debates in the field over the last 2 decades, but its practical implications are some of the most profound. There are people in jail right now largely as a result of recovered memory testimony, and some of them will be there for a long time. On the legal side, the important issue is how accurate recovered memories are, and to date, the best we can do is say that in some cases they probably are, while in others they probably aren't. We don't really have a good way…

Stereotype Threat Happens in the Brain

That's it! I'm never reading another imaging paper again, ever. OK, I might read one or two, and I might even post about them, but for now I'm telling myself, for my own sanity, that I'm never, ever, under any circumstances, going to read another imaging study. If you read my last post, or have been hanging around here for a while, you may have realized that I'm not a big fan of cognitive neuroscience. More often than not (I'd argue, always), you can learn the same thing and more by doing behavioral studies, and in most cases it'll cost you several hundred dollars less per participant. For…

Risk Factors For PTSD Differ In Women and In Men

This is from an interesting open-access article in Annals of General Psychiatry.  It describes two studies, relating to two different catastrophic events.  The authors examine the differences in how various risk factors may contribute to the development of PTSD in persons of each gender. href="http://www.annals-general-psychiatry.com/content/7/1/24/abstract">Risk factors predict post-traumatic stress disorder differently in men and women Dorte M. Christiansen,Ask Elklit Annals of General Psychiatry 2008, 7:24 doi:10.1186/1744-859X-7-24 18 November 2008 Background About twice…

Dirt

In the late '60's - early '70's, is was commonplace for bands to write songs that were utterly meaningless, then pass them off as great works of art.  The products of pure genius.   I head one such song on the way home from work: href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Horse_with_No_Name">A Horse With No Name, by America, released in 1972. Here's a review on a site that has song lyrics: bad lyrics | Reviewer: george | 4/15/2008 This song has a pretty good melody. It sounds good, IF YOU IGNORE THE LYRICS. For example, "in the desert, you can't remember your name 'cause there ain't no…

Selection of Antidepressants, pt. 2

(Part One is href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/02/basic_concepts_selection_of_an.php">here) Now we get to the heart of the matter: how does one decide what antidepressant to prescribe?  First, let's take a look at the factors that are considered relevant to the choice.  If you understand what factors are relevant, and why they are relevant, then you will start to see how the decision is made.  In the process of deciding which drug to prescribe, there are two bodies of information.  Well, actually there are more, but to keep things simple, I am going to artificially…

Science doesn't say that!

Have you ever noticed how the religious regard 'scientism' and 'reductionism' and demands for concrete evidence as barely a notch above obscenities? That is, until they need to reduce complex issues to simplistic claims and don the mantle of Science to support their beliefs. Then they become Holy Writ. You can really see this behavior in the abortion debate, where suddenly anti-choicers decide that humanity is defined by a particular arrangement of alleles in the genome. Case closed, they say, Science has spoken! Unfortunately, they get the science wrong, and we know their commitment to the…

On the slings and arrows of the philosophical job market.

Over at Bioethics Forum, Carl Elliott has an essay questioning the wisdom of the "convention interview" in the academic hiring process. As he notes, it is a fairly standard practice for philosophy departments to schedule a round of preliminary interviews for job candidates -- those who make the "long list" of applicants still in the running for the position -- at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division meeting. Among other things, scheduling interviews at the APA means that the job candidates are getting themselves to the conference on their own dime, and that there's some…

Friday Sprog Blogging: FSB year in review.

With only a few days left in 2007 (and having temporarily fled my children for a cat-free location, so as to give my immune system a chance to recover from cat allergens), this Friday I offer the sprog blogging year in review: January: Sunrise, sunset (Jan. 5), in which the sprogs think about the reason for time-zones. A child's garden of empiricism (Jan. 12), in which the winter cold turns the Free-Ride family to thoughts of experiments we might do in the garden. What's for dinner (Jan. 19), an appreciation of alliums and of the various plant parts we eat. Just Gimme Some Truth (Jan. 26),…

What they said at the panel on the future of higher education.

Since many of you were kind enough to suggest questions to ask of Margaret Spellings at SJSU's Founders Day "The Future of Higher Education" panel last Friday, I thought I should report back on that session. First, the bad (but utterly predictable) news: while Margaret Spellings gave the keynote address, she didn't stick around for the panel discussion afterwards -- so she wasn't there for the question and answer period. However, the panel of experts certainly had something to say about the Spellings Commission report on higher education. It was striking, as CSU Chancellor Charles B. Reed…

Having a family and an academic career: one blogger's experience (part 1).

I've decided to go ahead and say something about how I navigated (and am still navigating) the challenge of trying to have an academic career and a family as well. This is not a topic I can adequately address in a single post, so bear with me. And, since my main motivation for doing this is the hope that knowing about my experiences may be useful, somehow, to other people contemplating these waters, ask me if there's something I'm leaving out that you want me to talk about. (If it's too personal, I'll say so.) I think Rob Knop's comment is dead-on. Many of us in academia have been trained…

The boneyard of forgotten woo, but better

A fascination with quackery was one of the things that inspired me to start this blog. Some of it was disbelief that anyone could take some of the modalities that I write about seriously. Perhaps one of the most prominent examples of this reaction was when I first learned that there were people who are actually antivaccine. I'm sorry (well, no I'm not), antivaccine views are utter hogwash, and there's no good evidence that they they cause autism. There aren't fetal parts in vaccines, nor are there deadly toxins. What chemicals that are there are not dangerous. Moving on to the broader area of…

What if the right role for science is to shatter the frame?

Matthew Nisbet and Chris Mooney have a short policy paper in Science that criticizes scientists for how they communicate to the public. Mooney says that "many scientists don't really know what they're up against when suddenly thrust into the media spotlight and interactions with politicians" — I agree completely. We are not trained to be glib and glossy, and we simply do not come across as well as we could. We're also not really that interested, generally speaking, in the kind of presentation that plays well in 3 minutes on a news broadcast. It's more than a cosmetological failure, though;…